


Wraithslayer

by paleogymnast



Category: Stargate Atlantis, Stargate SG-1
Genre: Alternate History, Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Dragons, Hurt/Comfort, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-02
Updated: 2013-02-02
Packaged: 2017-11-28 02:28:06
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 46,673
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/669193
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/paleogymnast/pseuds/paleogymnast
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When the Ancients abandoned Atlantis, they did it with a plan. Return to Earth, develop a better intermediary between humans and Dragons and return to the Pegasus galaxy to finish off their mortal enemy, the Wraith. Only things didn't work out as planned. The Ancients returned to find Earth in the grip of the Goa'uld, a formidable and persuasive enemy hell-bent on destroying the new threat posed by the Ancients and their dragons.</p><p>Flash forward roughly 10,000 years. Dragons have been hunted persecuted to extinction on Earth. Everyone knows Dragons are evil and the natural enemy of humankind. But when during the Siege of Atlantis, John Sheppard runs through a tiny, forgotten lab while in pursuit of a Wraith, a long-forgotten machine starts glowing blue. Soon Dragons are popping up all over Atlantis. These Dragons just might be the key to winning the war against the Wraith and bringing peace and freedom to the Pegasus galaxy once and for all. But ten thousand years of Goa'uld-seeded hatred is standing in the way. Will the Dragons of Atlantis find the strength to risk everything to stop the Wraith? Or will thousands of years of prejudice destroy the Dragons before their plan takes flight?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Wraithslayer

**Author's Note:**

> Written for [Dragon BigBang](http://dragonbigbang.livejournal.com) on Livejournal. Please check out the absolutely gorgeous art entitled [Protectors](http://syble4.livejournal.com/222840.html) that the talented [Syble4](http://syble4.livejournal.com) created for this story!
> 
> This is a Stargate: Atlantis-centric story with some characters and events borrowed from Stargate: SG-1, set in an Alternate Universe where Dragons are real and hated in all human-dominated Milky Way socities. The story begins during "The Siege" and events of SGA track pretty closely up through there except Markham doesn't die. A few minor characters also find themselves on Atlantis a little sooner in this universe than they did in SGA. From there, our story diverges, although some events remain the same.

**Wraithslayer** by paleogymnast

_**Prologue:** _

When he was six years old, John Sheppard told his parents he wanted to fly—like a dragon—because then he could protect people and save them from the monsters. 

Patrick Sheppard was so furious little John could see the tic in his father’s jaw from across the room. He knew long before the blow landed, an open-handed slap, hard across his face that stung and turned his cheek pink, split his lip and made his eye water, that he had said something terribly wrong. He just didn’t know what.

“Don’t ever mention those abominations again, boy. If you do, I’ll see to it that you never set foot in my house again,” Patrick shouted before storming from the room.

John was scared, but he didn’t understand. Why should dragons he bad? How could they be monsters? Anyone could see they were beautiful, majestic, with sleek lines and powerful bodies, big wings that took them above the world so they could fly and see and soar with freedom... and perspective. Dragons breathed fire—the perfect tool for keeping bullies, and the _real_ monsters at bay.

His mother had taken him aside and tried to explain… “I know how you feel, John. I do. I see what you see. I know that dragons are good. But no one else does. No one else sees the beauty. They think dragons are bad, evil.”

“Like the monsters under my bed?” he had asked.

“Exactly,” his mom had agreed rubbing his nose. “Only maybe worse, because people think dragons burn towns and want to destroy everything around them.”

“Can’t they see dragons just want to keep us safe?” he had asked, dumbfounded.

“No baby, they can’t,” his mom had whispered, squeezing his hand. For a moment, he thought her eyes had flashed purple, like brilliant amethysts in sunlight. But he never asked her if that was true. He was too afraid.

Patrick didn’t speak to John for two months after that. It was the first time Patrick hit his son, and such physical violence wouldn’t happen again for years.

After that John always said he wanted to be a pilot. He wanted to fly, and if he couldn’t sprout wings and take to the skies, flying a plane or helicopter seemed like the next best thing.

His mom smiled every time he said he wanted to fly, but her eyes grew sad every time he mentioned being a pilot.

When his mom died, he wished he’d had the courage to ask about her eyes that day. Had he really seen what he thought he saw?

But it had been too risky.

That day, John made the decision to go to Stanford and join Air Force ROTC. He didn’t care if his father never let him in the house again. It had stopped being home when his mother had died.

~~~

_**Chapter 1:** _

_The Ancients ascended with a plan. They weren’t running from the Wraith and giving up. They weren’t escaping, they were trying to find a way to win. To work themselves out from under the hole they found themselves in, every day losing more and more of their numbers to the Wraith._

_Ancients were Dragons. They could all shift and transform—it went along with their many advanced mental abilities including telekinesis, telepathy, healing, etc. A Dragon’s bite was toxic to the Wraith, and_ dragonfire _was particularly destructive to Wraith and their ships. The same compounds in dragon saliva that could kill a Wraith get aerosolized along with the fire they breathe, meaning they both burn the biomechanical Wraith ships and poison them at the same time stopping their ability to heal and repair._

_Of course Wraith were similarly toxic to Ancients. They could not feed on Ancients, not _properly_ anyway because Dragon life force was quite different from that of humans. Besides, feeding exposed the Wraith to the same toxic aspects of a Dragon’s biochemistry as biting or breathing fire, so it was a mutually destructive scenario. The Wraith got sick, while the Ancients were incapacitated. Worse, the Wraith enzyme interfered with a Dragon’s ability to shift. _

_Had modern day humans known this, they would have understood the “drug” the Hoffans developed and why it behaved the way it did. They would have understood the origin of this strange mutation, and they never would have pursued it as a weapon… But these truths, like so many others in the Pegasus and Milky Way galaxies were lost to the ravages of time. And as evil reigned victorious, it rewrote history to suit its purpose._

_—from_ The Anthropology and Archaeology of Dragons _by Daniel Jackson, Ph.D._

~~~

“Major Sheppard, hurry! They’re coming!” Teyla Emmagan’s voice cut through the buzz of exhaustion in John’s mind and spurred him to run just a little faster.

In front of him, Rodney McKay was carrying the precious ZPM, the lifeblood of Atlantis. It was John’s mission to ensure Rodney actually got to the ZPM room to install the ZPM and that Rodney and the ZPM made it there in one piece. 

Of course the base—city—was overrun with Wraith and making a trip as simple as from the control room at the top of the central tower to the ZPM room at its base was an exercise in near-futility. At every turn the Wraith blocked their way. Sections of stairwell had were gone, missing, bombed out by darts making Kamikaze runs against the city, or covered by debris and broken glass from the impact of Wraith weapons against the city’s walls, lethal confetti creating unexpected barriers at the worst possible times. 

The transporters were working, or rather _some_ of the transporters were working and transporting to _certain_ places in the city. When it became clear they weren’t going to make it from the top of the tower to the bottom by any of the usual routes, at least not without three teams of combat engineers clearing the way for them, John had had the brilliant idea of playing leap frog with the transporters. In theory—based on the maps and damage reports he, Rodney, and Dr. Zelenka had squinted at for about three minutes in between explosions and volleys of enemy fire that shook the Control Room and temporarily deafened its occupants—if they took the transporters in a long circuit around the city they should be able to jump from one transporter to the next, bypassing the damaged areas and malfunctioning connections and eventually they would get to the transporter room across the hall from the ZPM room at the base of the central tower. All they had to do was make a few “short” sprints from one transporter to another in a handful of areas of the city.

It had sounded like a good idea at the time. That should have been warning enough.

Dr. Weir and Colonel Caldwell really should have known better than to trust the judgment of two physicists high on speed who hadn’t slept in a week and an Air Force major with a self-sacrificing streak who had just been beamed out of a nuclear explosion who _also_ hadn’t slept in a week.

Of course Teyla had signed off on the plan, and she was neither high nor as sleep deprived as the others. Maybe it really was the best option of a long series of terrible, horrible, no good, very bad options.

On second thought, John was wondering why they couldn’t have beamed Rodney and the ZPM into the room… He knew there _was_ a reason. They’d even discussed it… he just couldn’t remember for the life of him what it was. And right now, almost anything seemed better than the current situation.

“Whrrsplat!” another Wraith stunner buzzed by his head, this one coming so close, his left ear was actually numb. John turned and fired, then slid through the doorway that was closing behind McKay. He skidded to a halt on the other side, bumped into the wall that held the transporter controls, and nodded.

Teyla pressed the next button in their hastily planned sequence, the bright white glow of the transporter descended around them, and the doors opened again. Without enough time to catch their breath they were off again, leaving the transporter at a dead run.

John had given up hope three transporters ago that maybe there was _some_ place on the city where the Wraith wouldn’t find them. But the last two times they’d tried slowing to a sedate jog, the Wraith had nearly gotten them. Thanks to that hesitation, Rodney had a possibly fractured collar bone, Teyla was running on a sprained ankle, and John had taken the pointy end of one of the Wraith shock sticks through the outside of his left deltoid. 

Sure enough, by the time they’d rounded the first corner on their way to the next transporter, they had run into the Wraith. Except this time, they’d literally _run into_ a small Wraith patrol, two drones and a soldier. John had been in the lead this time, and he’d actually skidded around the corner and bounced headfirst off a drone’s armor. Only surprise saved them from being an instant snack.

Teyla grabbed the back of John’s tac vest and _pulled_ , dragging him back around the corner. He struggled to his feet and turned, laying down cover fire to buy them at least a few seconds lead. Teyla had Rodney by the arm and was almost dragging him along beside her. 

John counted to ten and ran after them. Only now they didn’t know where they were going. They were in an unfamiliar part of the city, in a tower they’d never even sent a team to explore, with three Wraith breathing down their necks and no idea how to get to the next transporter in the sequence. Hell, John wasn’t sure they knew how to find _any_ transporter save the one they’d just vacated. He’d looked at all the schematics, but under the haze of grief, pain, exhaustion, terror, and elation, he couldn’t conjure the precise schematic that went with each transporter. He wasn’t even sure he knew what tower he was in. The directions had run together as a sequence more than a map, and he was realizing now what a serious—possibly fatal—error that might have been. 

For that matter, John had never been very good with directions on the ground. Everything was much clearer in the air, laid out in logical patterns, beautiful, unfolding, the connections and pathways that were muddled and hidden on land instantly clear. His brain was just wired that way.

“John, hurry!” Teyla shouted, pausing in a doorway up ahead to aim at an unseen Wraith behind him, Rodney tucked behind her, curled protectively over the fragile ZPM as if using Teyla’s body for cover.

Hastily, John ducked and skidded to the side as Teyla sent shots streaming down the corridor in precise, three-shot bursts. He heard something—a Wraith—growl and stagger falling to a squelching stop far too close to where John had been standing. He caught up with Teyla and Rodney, and took the lead—a stupid idea—running faster than he’d run in years, perhaps in his entire life. 

“Sheppard? Whe—where’re you going?” Rodney wheezed behind him.

“Away,” John answered for lack of a better response. “Why, you know where a working transporter is?” 

Rodney spluttered, cursing something about having suspicions, but not being able to confirm without access to a computer, tablet, wall panel, something—

But John tuned him out. Not that Rodney’s words weren’t important, but suddenly, something seemed to _almost_ be calling to him. It reminded him a little bit of his childhood fantasies when he’d imagined Dragons were looking out for him, watching him from the clouds—later the stars—and if he needed them, they would fly down and save him, scare away the monsters and lead him to safety. Even now, as an adult—with a lifetime of indoctrination to the evils of dragonkind, of history lessons that taught dragons were not mystical, magical legends from fairytales, but very real monsters who throughout the years had laid waste to humanity and threatened to destroy all the held near and dear—he still didn’t believe dragons were evil, not _all_ dragons anyway. And while he would never admit it to another living soul, in the privacy of his mind and the presence of his conscience, a part of John was still that little boy, who believed dragons could save him. So when he recognized the feeling, he gave into it, and followed. It seemed to be tugging him onward— _just a little farther up ahead, and a little farther, keep on running, you can make it, then two rights and a left_. Even if it was leading him astray, their situation really couldn’t get much worse. Once one was sufficiently screwed, piling it on didn’t make much difference in the outcome. And at least this… _feeling_ was leading him away from the Wraith.

“John, do you know the way to a transporter?” Teyla panted between shots.

“No, why, you got a better idea?” he called back, starting to pant.

Teyla’s answer was a grunt; it was followed with an exasperated sigh from Rodney.

The feeling urged him faster, and John picked up the pace. The tallest Wraith was still pursuing them and gaining with every second. John glanced over his shoulder. “Not really, why, you got any better ideas?” he shouted.

“Come to think of it, no,” Rodney shouted back, firing his side arm as he ran clutching the ZPM to his chest.

“Hurry!” Teyla urged, “They Wraith are getting closer, and we have little time.”

“This way!” John called, following the subconscious prodding that led him onward. Ahead of him a door opened, he darted forward and ran inside. It was a lab, long and narrow, the sort of place Rodney would love to gawk at and explore. There was something different about it than the other labs they’d come across. Fewer screens, the consoles looked different, maybe something else, but John didn’t have time to spare the energy on pondering it, because ahead of him another door was opening, and if he wasn’t mistaken—yes! That was a transporter across the hall.

“Slow down!” Rodney panted.

“Move faster!” John shouted. “Transporter!” He pointed in its general direction.

“Teyla,” Rodney said by way of answer.

“I will cover us, go Rodney!” she yelled.

They moved through the lab so fast, it was no wonder John didn’t notice the strange machine in the corner or how it began to glow blue as he ran by it. 

Moments later, as Teyla sprinted across the hall and the transporter doors closed behind them, John thought he saw something blinking, flashing blue, faster and faster, casting the skin of the approaching Wraith in a particularly eerie shade. But as the transporter activated and everything was cast in bright, white light and they materialized in another part of the city, far away, John thought it must have been a trick of the light, or maybe his imagination running wild after too long with far too little sleep.

By the time they reached the base of the Control Tower and installed the ZPM at the last possible moment, the brief play of light was far from John’s mind. Days later, when he was back on Earth being debriefed and promoted, it was nothing more than an echo of a memory. By the time he returned to Atlantis six weeks later, leading a new team of eager explorers, that light was long forgotten.

But its effects were just beginning to be felt.

~~~

_**Chapter 2:** _

_While some countries have removed dragon laws from their books in the 150 or so years since the last known dragon was positively verified, most of these countries have done so because it appears the laws are no longer necessary._

_Very few sovereign nations have eased their position on dragons. The discussion of dragons in a positive light is almost universally banned. Several countries, most of them smaller countries or states with newly gained independence now hold the position dragons have always been myth. A myth used to conceal the evil acts of humanity._

_There are a few notable exceptions to this trend. In 1969, Canada removed its dragon laws. Dragons are no longer criminalized and if Canadian citizens or lawful permanent residents at the time of their identification, could remain and retain full civil rights. The discussion and print of alternative theories concerning dragons are also permitted._

_In 1997, the United States abolished its federal laws, concerning dragons. However, 47 states have retained their dragon laws without change. Notably, in Colorado and Virginia dragons and their immediate blood relations must be executed within 24 hours of identification, and the killing of a suspected dragon by a private citizen is a recognizable, lawful form of self defense._

_—From_ United Nations Commission on the Rights of the Dragon, May 3, 2006 _(excerpt)_

~~~

The first time Miko had the dream, she thought it was a nightmare. After all, they were monsters. Monsters just as sure as the Wraith. That was what everyone had been taught to believe. 

In her dream they flew, they flew great and majestic and… beautiful with their power. 

She woke panting, heart hammering in her chest. It took her a few moments to realize it wasn’t the Dragons that had awoken her, but that she thought they were beautiful. It was… sacrilege to believe such things. 

Miko blamed it on the Wraith.

The second time she had the dream, it lasted longer. The Dragons swooped and flew, breathing fire and swatting the enemy out of the way. But the enemy were not humans. They were Wraith! The Dragons clutched Darts in their jaws and crushed them to dust. They spread their wings and deflected the stunner blasts and the heavy explosive power of hive ships firing from orbit. They saved lives and gave the humans time to flee.

She was sweating when she awoke, her pulse racing, but not out of fear, out of her desire to see what came of the humans. Had the Dragons defeated the Wraith? Had they stopped the culling?

Later she would wonder how she had imagined the culling in such detail. After all, the only time she had seen Wraith in person was doing the Siege. That was more than enough first-person exposure to Wraith to last a lifetime, but she had heard enough to understand it had not been a typical culling. In the end, she blamed Dr. McKay and his too-vivid tales.

After that, she dreamed of Dragons every night. Sometimes they were fighting Wraith. Sometimes flying. Sometimes watching over humans. Sometimes they seemed to be frolicking, playing. Sometimes she thought they were humans… The Dragons seemed to transform. They talked to her in her sleep, and Miko remembered. She remembered the legend of the _Crimson Wraithslayer_ , the good Dragon, whispered to her at night by her grandmother. She’d been told never to speak of it, for it was too dangerous. And when her grandmother died, she let herself forget. It had hurt too much. Losing Grandmother was like losing the Dragons.

After a while, Miko heard their whispers in the daytime, and she felt herself begin to change…

The first time she transformed she was in her lab. She’d had been so thrilled and proud to have charge of her own lab with her own… _minions_. 

Now she was just grateful it was late and she was there alone, that it was her lab and she could send her minions home, because it meant no one had seen her. 

She’d caught sight of her reflection, sleek and red, reflected in the steel cabinets. She _was_ beautiful, and as majestic as the Dragons who had flown through her dreams. 

_We have been waiting for you…_ a voice called from the ether. It made her jump. She rose in the air, wings flapping, and hovered. Only she didn’t have control! She bounced off the closest cabinet and skidded across a lab bench, scrabbling with her talons and knocking stools to the side as she tumbled to the ground. She spent a moment dazed.

When she came back to herself, she was human again. Two arms, two legs, no talons or wings. She could have convinced herself it was all in her imagination, but she knew, deep down, it was not. 

Miko was a _Dragon_. A good Dragon, as in her grandmother’s tales. And no one must know!

Miko was glad she was clever and smart. No one _would_ know. She would find the security feed and delete the evidence. It would keep her safe.

~~~

_Dragons flew over the fields. Ink black wings stretched wide, they hovered, covering the sky. Evil was here, and the Dragons could defeat it, they could fulfill the edicts their people had set forth so long ago. The sky filled as more and more Dragons swarmed to the area. The dark ones would come soon. Through the ring and from the sky. Dragons would take flight, spread their wings further, and lift off into space. Armor of scales would protect them from the void, while their lungs stored enough oxygen to ensure their flames would burn even in the cold, black, night of space. They would twist and dash and dip and soar and swoop as they wended their way among the enemy’s fighters, lashing out with tail and tooth and claw to destroy the abomination, let light rule the galaxy again._

John woke, panting. He hadn’t dreamt of dragons in years. Why was he dreaming of them now? Why was he dreaming of dragons destroying the Wraith?

~~~

Once Miko shifted, it seemed to happen more and more frequently. She no longer had the dreams every night, but she no longer needed to. 

But the more she shifted, the more she feared she would be caught. One night, she was in her lab, late at night, rechecking calculations. When the calculations played out, she realized she had a good chance of increasing the efficiency of Atlantis’ primary systems! They could get more power than ever from the ZPM!

She was so excited it just happened. _Flip._ One minute she was standing in front of her desk, arms in the air, bouncing on the balls of her feet next to the stool she’d just hopped off; the next she was flapping her wings, flying, and then bouncing off the ceiling. She hit so hard, the room shook. 

Rattled, she quickly shifted back. She’d been practicing, getting more control. Other than the first time, the shift had never come without prompting. If she could not control it…

Miko shuddered. “Oh no. Oh no,” she repeated over and over again as her eyes surveyed the lab. The ceiling was dented. Laptops had been knocked to the floor. One, had a shattered screen. Stools were strewn everywhere, and one of the lab benches had been knocked over. Hastily, she ran around the lab, straightening stools, righting the bench, sweeping up broken glass and shards of plastic. When she had covered the evidence as much as she could, she ran back to her room, naked as her clothes had not survived the change. Sometimes, she could shift in such a way they would _slip off_ as her body morphed, but before it grew into the bulk of her Dragon form, but the surprise of this shift had not given her the opportunity.

She would erase the security footage. Erase the footage and find somewhere to train. She must gain better control!

~~~

Miko was the first to shift, but others soon followed. 

A sergeant shifted next. It happened while he was offworld. The team came under fire while he was in the woods scouting energy readings. He managed to shift back and salvaged replacement clothes from his pack to cover his tracks. But he was terrified, almost disbelieving. He told a story about having lost his footing and slid down a ravine when he heard the call for help. The team had a good laugh when they were well enough recovered, and gave him a gentle ribbing or two, but inside he was terrified.

Next was a British MP, working security for the city. She shifted at night, just before she finished her rounds. It happened when she slipped on one of the city’s many balconies, and for a split-second, thought she was going to fall. She didn’t know what to make of it, but sure as hell decided to keep her mouth shut.

Major Evan Lorne was next. He was in bed, asleep, tucked in beside David Parrish, botanist, team member, and gene therapy recipient to whom he felt unreasonably attached. The strength of the attraction was so great that Lorne found himself breaking his own rules letting David spend the night. (On Earth, he never would have shared a bed with a boyfriend on base.) That night, he had one of the dreams that had featured so prominently since he came to Atlantis. Only this time, it descended into a flashback and a nightmare. This time they were both held captive, him and David. He was being tortured, by the Wraith. A Wraith reached out, pressing its hand to David’s chest, and Evan just lost it. When he woke up, he was hovering about five feet above the bed, and David was looking up at him, eyes wide, and thinking, “This explains so much!”

~~~

It was little things at first. Details no one would notice, well, maybe no one but Rodney and his _most dedicated_ , least imbecilic minions. But Rodney was too busy keeping the city together and stopping idiots from destroying themselves and taking Atlantis with them, and the minions were too exhausted to devote the kind of detail and attention that was necessary to see what was going on...

Or rather what wasn’t going on, or wasn’t showing up. It was the little things.

Twenty seconds of erased video from the mess hall cameras at 0220 hours. A teeny glitch in the surveillance feed from the applied physics and engineering lab that if you looked at it very, very closely, you might think was looped. Mysterious power outages and surges that resolved themselves before the maintenance teams could work their way down the list to repair. Little... hiccups in the security system that knocked out the cameras in officer housing on one, two, three occasions. The wild exclamations of a visiting Athosian child who _swore_ she’d seen the shadow of a mythical Wraithslayer as it flew across the night sky. 

Nothing big. Nothing world-shattering. It was a hundred million things with innocent, plausible explanations. 

They were glitches and hiccups that hadn’t happened before, but there was a reason for that: The _Lanteans_ were soon discovering the little quirks they’d spent the last year painstakingly learning as they paid for their errors in blood no longer held true. Now that they’d installed a ZPM, everything had changed. New systems were coming online all the time, faster than anyone could track, sometimes popping up without notice. That _had_ to be the explanation. The new systems were causing all types of weird fluctuations, and the City and her inhabitants were having trouble keeping up.

And it was true. Just not in the way anyone thought or expected. Far from the central tower, in a lab that no one had entered since the Siege, a small machine was humming. It was tucked away, built into the wall the same as ever, but ever since Sheppard and his team had run through, it was glowing a soft, inviting, blue.

~~~

_**Chapter 3:** _

_For a century it worked. The Ancients managed to push back the Wraith despite their superior numbers. But the Ancients got complacent and confident that they would eventually achieve victory, while Wraith scientists got desperate and creative. They developed a chemical that would instantly incapacitate an Ancient, regardless of form. The Ancient would fall, unconscious and helpless, while the humans around it were unaffected. Because the Ancients could not speak in Dragon form, and the humans were not telepathic, there was usually no way to send warning. This drug, combined with some gene therapies that helped them to better detect Ancients, gave the Wraith a decisive edge. The tide of war turned, with the Wraith killing Ancients left and right, making it nearly impossible for them to defend human worlds, the Ancients retreated to Atlantis, desperate for a way to defend themselves. With the Ancients out of the general population of other planets, the Wraith could feed freely to support the war effort and focus on eradicating the Ancients._

_The Ancients now faced their darkest hour since the Ori drove them to leave Altera millions and millions of years ago. Some thought they should stay and fight—put enough effort into research and science and they would come up with a solution to counteract the Wraith’s new chemical weapon. Others thought they should leave, retreat. Among this group were those who saw death as their punishment for a) leading to the creation of the Wraith in the first place and b) meddling in human affairs. But there were also those Ancients who thought they should escape while they still could and leave the humans to fend for themselves._

_Still others sought further knowledge to fight the war—it was these Ancients who began to ascend en masse, hoping to find an answer to the Wraith or the wisdom to find a new solution for victory. And they _did_ only it wasn’t as neat and pretty or _quick_ as they would have liked. _

_Trying to interfere in the physical world while ascended was still just as dangerous and problematic as it had been the first time around. If the Ancients started messing around too much, they risked addiction to power, unforeseen consequences, having humanity either fear or worship them, and above all, the very real possibility they could wind up like the Ori._

_Interference from the higher planes would also attract the attention of the Wraith, and if the Wraith started ascending… No Ancient wanted to risk another ascended war. After all, the war with the Ori was still at a stalemate after millions upon millions of years._

_The Ascended Ancients could communicate with their fellows in Dragon form and pass some of their knowledge that way, but not well enough or fast enough to make a difference. They still could not communicate with the humans of Pegasus, and neither could their non-Ascended counterparts. What the Ancients really needed were intermediaries—people who reacted as humans to the Wraith (vulnerable to feeding, but not deathly allergic and not affected by Dragonsbane, the Ancient-incapacitating chemical weapon), but who could communicate with the Ascended on the astral plane and with the Ancients in the physical plane. With access to select knowledge of the Ascended, telepathy, and some other advanced mental abilities, these _interfaces_ would be the missing link, able to blend into the human population and create a buffer for the Dragons so they could fight back. The Ancients knew such people were possible, because there were a few children on human worlds where Ancients had intermarried generations ago, who had an Ancient a few generations back in their family tree and were able to hear the Ascended just fine and the Dragons. But there was not enough time to let natural selection take its course._

_So, the Ancients made a choice—those who could ascend, would. The rest would sink the city for its protection and travel back to Earth through the Stargate. There they could buy the time to win the war._

_They planned to either interbreed with the human population of Earth or spend a few generations genetically engineering a human-Ancient hybrid. They would stay on Earth long enough to build up enough numbers to fight—and win—the Wraith war, and return to Pegasus. They understood the Wraith would eventually pose a threat to _all_ inhabited galaxies especially if they ever realized the Ancients had not originated in Pegasus. _

_Only when the Ancients arrived back on Earth, things didn’t exactly go the way they’d hoped. The Ancients left Atlantis roughly 10,000 years ago, which was roughly 8,000 BCE, or almost precisely when Ra settled on Earth._

_At first, the Ancients thought they could pitch in and help stop the Goa’uld from getting a foothold, but the Ancients were weary and still stuck in the mindset of fighting the Wraith._

_The Goa’uld outsmarted them. They taught their human slaves that the Ancients were evil, the enemy. The Goa’uld learned what triggered the Ancients’ transformation and attacked them, provoking them to shift against their will, shift to protect themselves and others and fight back. Instead of protectors, the humans saw big flying beasts, biting, talons, and fire, which scared the already rattled humans. At times, an Ancient started a fires by accident during an act of self-defense or when tortured by the Goa’uld. Frightened, humanity saw not friends and protectors, but a monster to fear more than the gods that ruled their land. Humanity had their enemy number one._

_So thorough were the Goa’uld in their indoctrination, that the Tau’ri and humans of many other worlds retained their complete hatred and fear of dragons long after the Goa’uld left. Famed Ancients Merlin (Myrddin) and Morgan Le Fay (Ganos Lal) were able to do some work with humans by staying in human form, but even there, the indoctrination was too thorough to erode. Of note, Morgan used her Dragon persona as a “monster” to scare off illegitimate challengers._

_—from_ The Anthropology and Archaeology of Dragons _by Daniel Jackson, Ph.D._

~~~

“Are we there yet?” Rodney grumbled under his breath.

“Rodney,” Teyla replied in warning.

John just raised a laconic eyebrow in Rodney’s direction and kept on walking, twirling a piece of straw in his left hand while his right hand rested on the butt of his P90. 

“I’m just saying, would it have killed the ancients to be a little less cryptic? Couldn’t they have left a message like, ‘ZPM production facility, ten kilometers ahead on the right,’” he blocked out the imaginary sign in the air. “Why can’t we get information like that? Instead the Ancient database spits out a gate address with a cryptic ‘go here, hurry’ accompanying it, and we get the mission to find out what it is because Elizabeth got fed up after the third time the DHD redirected a wormhole here.”

“Well, you gotta admit that was kinda... creepy,” John replied. Although creepy wasn’t quite the right word for it. He’d been in the control room the last time the DHD had redirected, and he’d sensed a sort of desperation, almost as if there was an unseen consciousness on Atlantis—or that the city herself had a will—and was prodding, pleading with John to go. 

“Hah, I’m still half-convinced Chuck was just fucking with us,” Rodney grumbled.

“What about Dr. Kusanagi? She’s the one who found the log entries on this place. Without her input Elizabeth would have probably ignored this place, or locked it out of the DHD,” John asked.

“Nah, that’s just Miko. She’s really very efficient and terribly helpful.” Rodney cocked his head to the side. “I used to think she was brown nosing, but now I think that’s her personality. It’s like she gets off on making people happy.” Rodney looked like it was unthinkable that someone would enjoy making others happy.

“Yeah, ‘cause most of us just want to be jerks, McKay,” Ronon grumbled from where he was bringing up the rear.

“We found an energy signature, did we not? And we are following it? Certainly this is worth investigating, and now we know where we are going. We will be there soon enough,” Teyla said, ever the peacemaker, cutting Rodney off before he could get riled up.

“Settle down, boys and girls, settle down,” John said, chuckling. “So McKay, tell me, do you _really_ think this is a ZPM production facility? Because that would, kind of make my… decade.”

“Make your decade, Colonel, it would be the discovery of a lifetime, no, a hundred life times,” Rodney began babbling. 

John tuned him out. It was like old times. Despite the… promotion… and Ronon’s presence (Ford’s Absence), and the dreams he’d been having, things were finally starting to get back to normal, or whatever passed for normal in the Pegasus galaxy.

“—but with these energy readings, I think it’s a distinct possibility. We’ve never seen anything quite like this before, but it is most similar to what we get from a ZPM. Besides, it might explain why the Ancient Database was so urgent, yet cryptic.”

“That’s, that would be really good news, Rodney,” John said with a mixture of relief and surprise.

“I know, that’s what I was saying—oh,” Rodney stopped abruptly and looked at the modified LSD in his hands. 

“What is it?” Ronon asked, monitoring their surroundings with hyper vigilance.

Rodney made the gesture to stop, and then pointed them to the right.

John was impressed. Rodney actually got it right. He’d been practicing, taking things more seriously. These days, when Rodney complained about being out in the field, John got the sense it was out of habit. Rodney liked fieldwork, and he seemed eager to make himself a more skilled team member.

“New readings,” he looked up from the LSD with an expression of awe. “A schematic just downloaded itself into the LSD. It says there’s an entrance, uh, about a click and a half that way.” Rodney consulted the LSD again then looked up again beaming. “I think this is it! John, I think we’ve found it. If these readings are correct, we have ourselves a functioning ZPM manufacturing facility.”

“Let’s just get there, McKay,” John said, settling Rodney down, and restraining his own inner glee.

~~~

Four hours later, John was bouncing on his heels, unable to restrain his glee. It would take a little time to get the facility up and running, but they could get it there. Rodney was more interested with downloading everything they could from the facility’s database, he’d even enlisted Teyla, and a somewhat grudging Ronon to help.

John had given Atlantis a cautiously optimistic description of what they’d found when they checked in, but now there was something else. Something was nagging at the back of his mind.

“Rodney, do you have the schematics on this place downloaded?” he asked.

“Yeah, why?” Rodney replied.

“Just in case we have to leave this place, or it gets destroyed,” John answered.

“Why would you say—” Rodney started to protest, but suddenly lost steam. “I’m 90 percent confident I could reconstruct this facility if the need arose, _if_ I can find or manufacture all the materials.”

“I’m going to take another look around,” John said with a nod.

Rodney dismissed his apparent non sequitur with a wave of his hand and a shake of his head, and went back to poring over the Ancient controls.

Thirty minutes later, John completed his circuit of the facility, having found nothing that explained the now-incessant _itching_ feeling in the back of his mind. As he stomped back into the main room of the lab, he noticed something on the far wall. He’d thought it was just a series of circles that he’d thought was a tile pattern. Only, it seemed strangely familiar. He had seen something like it before… where, where… _On Dagan!_ Realization dawning, John rushed over to the wall and slapped his hand against one of the circles.

“I thought I was feeling oddly jumpy. Thought it was all the caffeine I had this morning—eleven cups before ten a.m. is a lot even for me,” Rodney muttered. “John, what is it?”

“Oh my,” Teyla said.

“Is that what I think it is?” Ronon asked.

In John’s hands was a ZPM.

“Is it fully charged?” Rodney demanded.

“How the hell should I know?” John answered, whirling around.

“You’re the one who found it. Don’t drop it!” Rodney cautioned unnecessarily. “How did you find it anyway?” He made grabby hands for the ZPM, half-jogging to John.

“Recognized the circles in the wall, from Dagan,” he shrugged with one shoulder as he handed over the ZPM. “Pushed the circle, it opened. Just a hunch.”

“Convenient hunch,” Ronon said, crossing the room to where Rodney had absconded with the ZPM. 

It looked like some kind of ring— _oh_ —it was a ZPM docking station. 

“Full charge!” Rodney said. “I can’t believe it; things never go so we—”

But Rodney didn’t get to finish jinxing them. At that moment alarms started blaring from the LSD and the laptops and the facility itself.

John felt like insects were crawling up his spine.

And Teyla whirled around, face stark and pale, eyes wide. “Wraith!” she screamed.

Everything happened in an instant.

“How’d they find us?” Ronon asked.

“It could be a coincidence,” Teyla offered.

“It’s not a coincidence!” John and Rodney both shouted, looking at each other nervously. Clearly neither of them knew how they knew that.

“I’ll check the other circles,” John said quickly, running back to the wall, and slapping at the circles spaced evenly in the tile.

“Oh no,” Rodney said, consulting the LSD again. “I should have seen this.”

“What?” John and Ronon asked simultaneously. 

“The facility. Its power output tripled when we got within range. I didn’t think to look—” he broke off, darting around the room from console to console.

“And?” Teyla asked.

“And a Wraith transmitter picked it up. It must have been dormant, set to relay a subspace message if the facility powered up again,” Rodney said, almost in a whine.

“Why not just come here when it was dormant? Blow it up? Use it?” Ronon asked.

“Because this entire facility is ATA-locked. No gene, no power. The Wraith probably couldn’t even get in the door, let alone access its database or use it,” Rodney explained.

“Well can you re-lock it?” John asked, nervously.

“Not enough time. I’ve managed to cross the secondary power system with the backups to trigger an overload. It should be enough to level the facility,” he looked up. “That plus wiping the database should keep them from using it. I could trigger a ZPM overload, but we’d never get clear in time. This facility is built into a limestone cliff system. An explosion of that magnitude could send the entire complex careening into the ocean hundreds of meters below.”

“There’s no way you can save it?” John asked, in dismay.

“Isn’t that my line?” Rodney asked. “John, we can’t risk it. If the Wraith managed to get their hands on a ZPM or the plans to make or charge one.”

“No, we can’t,” John admitted.

“Are those all charged?” Ronon interrupted suddenly.

Everyone looked at John.

John looked down at his arms. He was holding four ZPMs. “I don’t know,” he admitted. “The rest were empty; these were all I found.” Plus the one Rodney had taken they had five, at least one of them charged.

“Doesn’t matter,” Rodney said with a wave of his hands. “Put them in our packs. Wrap them in clothes, anything soft you have. We can test them later. There isn’t time.”

“Why—” John started.

“Wraith are coming through the gate, and a hive just dropped out of hyperspace,” Rodney supplied, consulting the LSD.

“They are _close_ ,” Teyla added.

“If we don’t leave now, we’ll never leave,” Rodney added.

“Delete the database and set the overload,” John said, with a resigned nod.

~~~

Everything after that was a blur. They ran. The Wraith followed. They shot back. The Wraith tried to stun them. They changed directions. Headed into a forest. Tried to cut back to the gate.

Anywhere they went, the Wraith followed. 

_They must be tracking us from space_ , John realized, _but how?_ None of them were tagged with tracking devices, although it was possible the Wraith were just targeting any life signs moving that were not their own. But he had a sick, sinking feeling it was something else. The Wraith could be tracking their precious cargo. Or they could be tracking _him_ ; him and Rodney—anyone with the Ancient gene.

After an hour of running, the Wraith had fallen in close and pushed them to the edge of a cliff. Ronon had found a narrow stone path that ran along the edge of the cliff face, climbing up and down with sharp switchbacks. It was the only way. 

It was a horrible plan. They would be trapped.

But they had no choice.

The Wraith had forced them off the primary path and onto a secondary paths that wound along the very edge of the cliff. They had cliff face on one side, and a dead drop on the other… and up ahead, John could see their mistake.

Rather than being another switchback, the path dead-ended in a sheer cliff. 

Running out of room and ammo with the Wraith hot on their tail, John felt like he was burning up. Something inside him, like a desperate, caged bird was striving, yearning to be free, flapping under his skin, desperate to get out. But they kept on running, and running, until there was no where left to run and then… Rodney slipped.

Switch flipped, lights on, John turned, bringing his P90 to bear… but by the time he was facing the Wraith, his P90 was on the ground, along with the torn remnants of most of his uniform, and he was swiping through the air with the talons on an outstretched foreleg, sweeping the Wraith off the narrow path and over the cliff’s edge. He was flying, hovering about three feet off the ground. But the Wraith who had Rodney didn’t stop. Seeing the feeding hand descend towards his friend—his friend who he had always cared too much about, his friend whom he loved, his friend whose mind was crying out in terror as the Wraith started to grab hold, John opened his mouth to scream—and a fireball came out, burning the rest of the Wraith and sending their charred remains to the ground (or off the cliff).

John flapped his wings—how cool was that? He had _wings_!—and hovered above the cliff edge, letting out a whoop of joy. Only he was pretty sure the whoop was only in his head, because what actually came out of his mouth was a puff of smoke and steam with a few tendrils of flame.

 _Rodney_ let out a whoop that sounded suspiciously like what John had heard in his mind. “John,” he gasped, voice cracking, “you were amazing. Completely, totally—I mean, did you see that? Wraith! You killed them. And I’m okay. We’re okay!” Rodney was babbling, and in John’s mind he could hear everything Rodney wasn’t saying aloud. _I was so scared. And so angry. We do not go out this way!” he shook his head. “But then the Wraith were there and the edge was close, and I just couldn’t think—I couldn’t think of anything fast enough to save us. And that Wraith had me, and then you—you saved me. Thank you!_

“I can hear your thoughts,” John said, or at least he tried to, but he was still decidedly not human shaped, even if he was slowly letting himself return to the ground, his talloned feet grazing the hard-packed earth as he slowly settled 

“I know, I can hear you too,” Rodney said grinning, “clear as day.” He pointed a finger at his temple. 

John smiled back, a grin spreading over his features and making him tingle to the tips of his ears, his toes. And they were his toes, because the terrible itch and need and panic, the desperate necessity that he _protect_ had finally subsided, and he had folded back into himself, and now he was human again. “This is— this is—,” he stammered, searching for the word, but coming up short. Now that he was back on the ground on the narrow path nestled up against the sheer cliff face, the universe seemed a lot less vivid, the answer far less clear. “This is—” Now that he was back in human form... 

He watched Rodney’s eyes widen with shock, his expression almost a caricature of disbelief before his features fell into something lost and miserable.

John felt his world crumble and implode in perfect sync. “This is—”

“—Terrible. Horrible. Really, really bad,” Rodney finished, and even now, John could feel Rodney’s thoughts brushing against his, Rodney’s mind hanging back at the periphery of his awareness.

“This is awesome,” Ronon butted in with a genuine laugh, that quickly stopped as John and Rodney turned toward him with twin looks of misery and fear. 

_It figures that even my teammates would make fun at my expense_ , John thought with a sudden rush of bitterness. Only the look of confusion on Ronon’s face seemed utterly genuine, and the small part of John’s mind that wasn’t wrapped up in fear and betrayal was telling him Ronon wouldn’t joke about something so serious.

“I—I don’t understand,” Ronon stuttered. 

“Surely this is good news,” Teyla said, looking from John to Rodney and back again. “You are blessed. The ancestors have chosen to smile upon you, grant you the gift of salvation, the ultimate weapon against the Wraith.”

“My people called it the Ancestor’s Touch,” Ronon said to Teyla.

“Wait, what, are you crazy? Did you not just see John turn into a—a—,” but Rodney couldn’t bring himself to say the word. The taboo was too strong.

“A Dragon,” John grit out, the words feeling like broken glass in his throat. His knees wobbled as realization sunk in, or maybe it was just his blood sugar. _Shifting_ like that had to take energy, a _lot_ of energy.

~~~

Teyla and Ronon had never heard of evil Dragons. Since Dragons were revered in their respective cultures, and associated strongly with the Ancestors, they had a hard time grasping how John or Rodney could have grown up with such fear. 

On the long, hushed trip back to the gate—which was suspiciously Wraith-free—John and Rodney shared their stories of Earth and the hatred towards Dragons there, until Teyla and Ronon realized the seriousness of the situation. They agreed to keep John and Rodney’s secret at any cost—they all realized that Rodney’s sudden ability to communicate telepathically with John was almost as dangerous a detail as John’s sudden transformation. 

Of course, when they made it back to Atlantis, they had to go through medical, and Carson was far too observant.

~~~

_**Chapter 4:** _

_By the time the Tau’ri began to venture out among the stars in the late 20th Century, Dragons were viewed as universally villainous in every major Earth religion and mythology. While a few legends, mostly in Eastern traditions and in Welsh folklore persisted in which Dragons are helpful, those stories were subject to purges throughout modern human history. Reading or being identified with these tales was seen as heretical, deviant, seditionist, or treasonous._

_Nevertheless the Ancients remained on Earth and interbreed with humans and did not all ascend, so there were real, honest Dragons on Earth for much of human history. Up until the mid-19th Century, Dragons or suspected Dragons were identified on a regular basis. And when identified, they were hunted, captured, and exterminated. The practice of Dragon hunting and draconis purges were exceptionally traumatic as many of the as Dragons who were identified did not realize they were Dragons at all. Instead, when faced with extreme stress or duress, their instincts took over and they shifted, sometimes as a means of survival, and sometimes out of an instinctive need to try to _help_. _

_Once a Dragon was identified his or her entire family was in danger as suspected Dragons. Practices varied throughout history and among the various nations. The Dragon’s family might be rounded up and executed as well, or they might be watched, ostracized, and eventually exiled. Although they ultimately captured other identifiable groups as well, the Salem Witch Trials, the Spanish Inquisition, and many other infamous purges throughout history began as Dragon purges aimed at identifying Dragons and Dragon sympathizers. “Witches,” were most often those who believed in Dragons’ benevolent and helpful nature and supported them or tried to invoke their help. The majority of people feared witches would bring Dragons down on them to attack, or worse invoke the wrath of God (or the gods, and bring about the return of Ra and others like him._

_—from_ The Anthropology and Archaeology of Dragons _by Daniel Jackson, Ph.D._

~~~

“Colonel, you need to tell me what’s wrong, what happened out there. If you encountered something a—,” he broke off, “ _unexpected_ , I canna help if I don’t know what it is.” Carson shot them all an imploring look.

“Nothing happened,” Ronon growled back, with enough emphasis that John and Rodney both glared at him, Sheppard’s more sarcastic and exasperated than Rodney’s, piercing and accusatory.

“Doctor,” Teyla began, her tone polite and diplomatic as always, “I assure you, nothing untoward from a medical standpoint occurred on our last mission.” She let the words hang in the air, while she maintained eye contact with Carson. “There was, however, a path that we were forced to follow. I sensed Wraith activity in the area and it was the only path of escape. The path took us along a rock formation. The path was very narrow, and the cliff was very steep. Some of us found it... _unsettling_ ,” she finished with a tilt of her head glancing at Rodney as she did so.

Rodney gave a huff of protest and glared at Teyla in return, but it was a second too late and, John could tell, forced, although Rodney did a good job of hiding it. That there was no real heat in Rodney’s glare, no complaints about throwing him under the bus, underscored how serious it was.

Carson stood, assessing them, right hand hovering in front of his mouth, right elbow cupped in his left hand. For a few precious moments, it looked like Carson was going to buy it. 

John felt his heart leap into his mouth in anticipation. A little flutter in his stomach, the twitching of muscles in his back—like wings—combining with the constant itch under his skin as his body primed on the cusp of fight or flight... quite literally as the case might be. 

Gaze sweeping over them each in turn, assessing, Carson finally broke his silence, his eyes seeming to jerk away from John at the last minute before settling somewhere over his shoulder. “I’m afraid I need to speak to Colonel Sheppard for a moment, but the rest of you are free to go.” Carson nodded at Ronon and Teyla and finally Rodney.

A pained little gasp, halfway between a moan and a click, slipped from of Rodney’s lips, and John felt Rodney reach out with his mind, protective, desperate, angry. 

Carson opened his mouth to speak, and John had had enough. His hand shot out, faster than should have been possible, and clasped around Rodney’s wrist. “Rodney stays,” he proclaimed, with finality, his voice brooking no argument. 

Under his fingertips he felt Rodney’s pulse flutter and steady as he began to settle and relax. 

Carson stared at them, his eyes fixed on John’s fingers wrapped around Rodney’s wrist, pale skin encircled by tan fingers, juxtaposed against the blinding white strip on John’s wrist where his wristband should have been, the iridescent white of an old, long-faded scar bisecting the sunless skin—

John hadn’t even noticed it was gone, and how was that possible? Normally he felt _naked_ without it. 

For a moment, it looked like Carson was going to disagree, but eventually he acquiesced, the fight draining out of him like a deflating balloon. “Very well,” he said with a resigned sigh. “Colonel, Doctor, if you will follow me, please?” Carson gestured towards his office and started walking, checking to ensure they were following him with a pointed glance over his shoulder. 

John rose, and followed, Rodney sticking close to his side.

Rodney’s wrist twisted in his hand, fingers finding John’s greedily and twining together in a gesture of solidarity. 

John still felt like he was walking towards the firing squad, his father’s childhood lecture echoing in his mind. Still, with Rodney by his side, it didn’t feel nearly as bad. Maybe they’d find a way to survive after all. 

When they reached Carson’s tiny, cramped office, he ushered them inside, locking the door behind them without fanfare. It was what he did next that surprised John. Carson dimmed the lights, lowered the blinds on the glass wall next to the door, and added a medical security lockout on the door that would keep just about anyone out. Then he reached into his desk and pulled out something John didn’t recognize.

“An Asgard jammer, seriously?” Rodney asked, his voice almost squeaking with surprise. 

Carson didn’t answer, just dropped the device on his desk and activated it. 

Unfamiliar as it was, John knew enough to know the jammer would probably knock out Atlantis’ security surveillance systems within the confines of Carson’s office, while masking their conversation from physical eavesdroppers. 

Apparently satisfied, Carson leaned back against the precariously overloaded shelving unit behind his desk and crossed his arms over his chest. “Sit,” he commanded.

John’s knees gave out and he found himself complying, falling into one of the too-small chairs facing Carson’s desk. Rodney took the seat next to him and caught John’s eye. Rodney was warry, but somewhat encouraged—by the privacy Carson was affording them, John knew. 

But a little voice in the back of John’s mind couldn’t shake the feeling Carson was isolating them to make them—or at least him—easier to subdue. Kill. Executed. 18 U.S.C. Section 3742a: _Once identity is confirmed by a Dragon Tribunal, a known Dragon must be terminated on sight._ Who cared if the law had been repealed when so many still believed in it?

“What happened on P2C-M36? And don’t say nothing, because that was some bloody awful lying Ronon did out there.” A vein pulsed in Carson’s temple. John had never seen him so angry. Atlantis’ CMO was usually alarmingly gentle, disarmingly kind, and almost timid, at least in a nonmedical context. 

John swallowed, drawing it out, his mind casting about for a plausible cover story. “Look,” he said, forcing his muscles to unknot, sliding down the seat in a lazy sprawl, trying his damnedest to ignore the _wing muscles_ in his back twitching, preparing to take him into flight. “Ronon wasn’t lying, he was just trying to help me save face.” John swallowed, a bead of sweat forming under his jaw and rolling slowly down, down over the bob and swell of his Adam’s apple. 

Beside him, Rodney flinched mentally, his left eyebrow ticking up, up, up with worry. 

“Teyla wasn’t lying about the path, or the cliff. It was probably steeper and narrower than she made it sound. And it was a long way down,” John filled his words with the honesty of the statement. “I may have been—showing off, and I slipped. Almost had a fall. Twisted my wristband right off in the process,” John added, hoping it would be enough. There was still a chance—a good chance—Carson would ground him, for the time being anyway, while he ruled out inner ear problems, vertigo, and any number of other conditions that could explain what John had just said.

For about three seconds, Carson looked at them, thinking. For a split second, John thought he was going to buy it. But then Carson’s expression grew stony. “Colonel,” he answered, “I don’t know what you’re playing at, and I canna begin to fathom what you think is so bad to tell me that you’d risk your flight clearance and hours of unpleasant tests to avoid telling me.”

“I—” John began to protest.

“You didn’t fall. You have no abrasions, no contusions, not even a wee scratch visible anywhere on your body. This isn’t a game. I canna treat you if I don’t know what happened.” Carson made a frustrated huff. “Look, Colonel, you’re the second person to have the same anomalies on your blood tests. Once could be a fluke, or an error in the machinery. I canna just dismiss this. If something’s wrong I need to know before it becomes a bigger problem.”

It took a few moments for Carson’s words to sink in. John could feel the exact moment when the pieces snapped into place, because Rodney came to the same realization in perfect synchronicity. “Wait,” John commanded, holding his left hand up in the universal gesture for ‘stop.’ “Did you say the _second_ person?” 

“Yes,” Carson replied, his demeanor now flabbergasted. “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you. If this is a new side effect of gate travel, something you’ve encountered offworld, or a new big that’s spreading—”

“Who was the first?” Rodney demanded, cutting Carson off. 

“Major Lorne,” Carson answered with only the briefest hesitation. “Although if we’re gonna have this sort of conversation, we really should get Elizabeth, invol—”

“No!” John and Rodney both shouted, shared panic racing through them. John could feel as the details slotted into place with frenetic speed in Rodney’s mind as if Rodney’s thoughts were his own. John and Major Lorne were both natural gene carriers... They were descended from the Ancients... Ronon and Teyla’s cultures both had mythologies that centered around the Ancients and their connection to... Dragons... John had transformed—shifted—into a Dragon... He and Lorne both had the same abnormal blood work, and the anomalies had only arisen _after_ John had shifted... Lorne had probably shifted too, and Carson... Carson was a natural gene carrier too. Add to that Rodney’s artificial gene and his newly developed telepathy with John that had started when John had shifted, and the evidence was all stacked up and pointing in one direction. One very, very bad direction for people from the Milky Way galaxy, where Dragons were hunted and reviled as agents of destruction. 

“Excuse me?” Carson asked, looking nervously from John to Rodney and back again, genuine fear creeping into his expression.

“I promise you; we’ll tell you everything,” Rodney blurted after a few uncomfortable moments of silence. 

Carson opened his mouth to speak.

“But not _here_ ,” John hissed through clenched teeth. 

“No, not here,” Rodney echoed. “It’s not safe.” Rodney followed Carson’s forlorn gaze to the Asgard jamming device.

“Not even with that on,” John confirmed. 

“This is highly irreg—”

“Trust me,” Rodney began, but Carson’s eyes narrowed. 

“I know what you think of medicine, Rodney.”

Rodney held up his hands in defense. “No, no, no. In this case I’m sure your brand of voodoo will prove exceptionally useful.”

“Trust _us_ ,” John countered, before Carson could object again. “I know this doesn’t look good, but this is bigger than me, bigger than you, bigger than Atlantis, and it requires the utmost discretion.” He shot Rodney a glance. “Well meet you at—”

“Teyla’s,” Rodney added.

“—Teyla’s later. Say,” John glanced at his watch, realized it was missing, and glanced at the clock on Carson’s wall. “1420?” He turned back to Carson and looked him in the eye. “Just, whatever you do, don’t tell anyone—”

“—especially not Elizabeth,” Rodney piped up.

“No, especially not Elizabeth,” John agreed. “Don’t show my blood work to anyone, Lorne’s either.”

“While you’re at it, you should probably retest mine too,” Rodney suggested, sounding almost eager.

“Do you expect I will find the same abnormalities in your blood work?” Carson asked with incredulity.

“Hmm? Oh no, not the same. But you’ll probably find something,” Rodney added. 

“Why should I trust you? Why should I do anything you say? For all I know you’ve been infected with a disease that has compromised your judgment?” Carson challenged.

“Let’s just say it’s an, um, matter of military security, would you say John?” Rodney hedged.

“More like a matter of galactic security with a broad-sweeping impact throughout the Stargate program, both here and on Earth,” John said with a tight, fake smile, “but ‘military security’ should work.”

John rose, crossed to the door and unlocked it with his mind. The security override only worked from the outside. Rodney followed him without a word, and Carson said nothing. They walked in silence until they were out of the infirmary and well down the hall. 

“How did you know that would work?” Rodney asked.

“Because Carson believes us, or he wants to. Couldn’t you feel it?” John asked.

“Almost,” Rodney admitted. “It’s not quite...”

“Clear?” John suggested.

“Yeah,” Rodney agreed. “With you, you’re just _there_. It doesn’t take any effort. But Carson’s not quite...”

“Yeah, “ John echoed. He looked around surreptitiously, trying to avoid looking suspicious on the security feed, but wanting to make sure no one was in earshot. “Are you getting everything I’m thinking?” he asked in a hush.

“Well not everything. Only what you want me to know, I think.” Rodney looked around, then glanced down at his watch as they turned a corner and had to press against the wall to avoid colliding with a fast-walking sergeant. She saluted John and continued on her way, Rodney’s eyes narrow and suspicious, following her until she was out of sight, as if he might catch an indication if she’d overheard them. “Why’d you tell Carson 1420? It’s only 1300.”

“We,” John gestured between them, “need to go have a talk with Major Lorne.” He crossed to the nearest transporter and stepped inside.

“We?” Rodney asked, his voice squeaking with surprise. “What do you mean, we? The major is one of your military types. If we have a scientist turning into a Dragon, I’ll handle it, but this is your arena,” he protested. Nevertheless, he followed John into the transporter.

The door closed behind him with a swish, and John crossed his arms and glared at Rodney, all the while doing his best to ignore the too naked spots on both wrists where his watch and wristband should be. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed Rodney, but you’ve been following me pretty closely since I changed.”

“Me? You’re the one who grabbed my wrist and demanded I stay when Carson wanted to talk to you!”

“Would you have left if I hadn’t held on?” John asked.

“I—” Rodney began, “no, I couldn’t leave you alone with Carson, not while he was a threat.”

John nodded. “I’ve been finding it pretty hard to be away from you,” he admitted.

“Because it’s not safe, for either of us, and you!” Rodney held up his pointer finger, wagging it accusatorially at John, “You changed to _protect_ me,” he realized.

John let out a sigh and slumped against the wall, reaching out to select their destination—officers’ quarters, where Major Lorne might have gone when he got off shift. “Yeah, I did,” he said softly as they rematerialized with a flash of white light. 

Rodney followed him out with him without any further protestations.

~~~

_**Chapter 5:** _

_With everything we’ve learned about the Goa’uld, it probably shouldn’t have come as a surprise that they had meddled in our own belief structures and values systems in yet another way. But our knowledge of the Ancients was separate. Some within the Stargate program almost treated them with a deific reverence. The Ancients came before. They are our ancestors, a closely related species who seeded our galaxy like so many others with the building blocks of life. In many minds—mine included, for a time—the Ancients were of the past. So long past that the Goa’uld couldn’t have corrupted the basics of what we knew._

_And that’s where we went wrong. We forgot, you see, about the ancients who came back. The Lanteans who returned from the Pegasus galaxy to find our world newly overrun by evil, parasitic snakes. In retrospect, it seems completely obvious. Fresh off their losing war with the Wraith, the Ancients were tired, but they understood the importance of success more than ever. They tried and they fought, transformed, and beautiful Dragons on magnificent wings took to the skies to try fight back humanity’s new oppressors._

_And the Goa’uld used their guise as our gods to twist the truth, cast the Ancients as villains, and convince the Tau’ri to turn against their would-be saviors. Their indoctrination was so complete, that even long after we ran Ra off the planet, we still feared Dragons. Over time, even the myths and legends the Ancients created—Merlin, Morgan le Fay, Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table—were twisted around until the Dragons were cast as villains._

_We should have expected it. We should have questioned. But when the truth came out, we weren’t prepared, and the truth was almost our undoing._

_—_ Interview with Dr. Daniel Jackson, January 19, 2010 _(excerpt)_

~~~

Evan was curled up on the corner of his bed, knees tucked up tight to his chest, but he felt more like a bat hanging from the rafters. Waiting for predator or prey, he wasn’t sure. He’d had a dream again last night and he’d awoken _changed_. Only this time he was alone, having sent David back to his quarters, unwilling to tempt fate a second time so soon after the first. _Being alone was so much worse._

The moment his eyes snapped open, he was searching, surging with the need to protect, fight, defend, and a little voice deep inside was telling him the person he needed to protect most was a high-strung, verbose, excitable botanist. It made no sense. Well that and how he was stuck in the form of a _Dragon_ , the most feared, reviled monster in Earth’s history. The universal villain. How could a villain protect? Then he’d sneezed, and that meant breathing fire, and he’d set the drapes on fire, would have—should have—set off the fire alarms, but he was frantically thinking _off, off, OFF_ , and Atlantis seemed to have taken him seriously. Then he’d flown a little too high in his efforts to back away from the fire, and he’d slammed right wing and upper back into the ceiling, which translated into a very sore shoulder and incredibly tender bruises along his upper thoracic spine when he shifted back to human form.

At least he hadn’t been alone for long. About thirty seconds after he ricocheted off the ceiling, his door—which he’d locked and secured, slid open and closed again equally fast, revealing a terrified-looking botanist still in his pyjamas standing just inside the doorway.

That had been two hours ago, and David hadn’t left since. Evan had shifted back, but that was about it. He was still naked and still shaking, another torn-and-destroyed t-shirt and sleep pants lying haplessly discarded on the floor next to the bed. He was going to have to start sleeping naked again. At this point the benefits outweighed the downsides. If he kept _shifting_ in his sleep, and every time meant another destroyed set of sleepwear, the quartermaster was going to notice something was up. Destroyed t-shirts were easy to explain, but sleep pants? Even boxers would be difficult to explain.

“Evan, are you sure you don’t want to go to the infirmary?” David asked for the third time, as he paced in front of the door. “We don’t know what this does to your body. _Shifting_ probably burns hundreds of calories. Maybe thousands. Your blood sugar could be bottoming out. You’re white as a sheet,” he added in an almost pleading tone.

“No,” Evan said, the word coming like a bark, much harsher than he had intended. He cringed, hating himself for snapping at David when he was only trying to help. “No,” he tried again, more softly. “Carson suspects something. He was looking at me funny last time. If we go back…” He shook his head. “I’ll be okay,” he said with more confidence than he felt.

David looked at him skeptically, pausing in his circuit, to regard Evan closely. 

The shaking probably undermined his reassurance, Evan realized belatedly.

“Maybe at least get dressed?” David suggested, “I mean if you’re not going to go back to sleep.”

They were assigned to the night shift this rotation—Atlantis, like the SGC, tried to keep team members on the same duty schedule even when they were on base—which meant they were both supposed to be sleeping during what was essentially the middle of the day. Sometimes Evan thought being stationed at Cheyenne Mountain was easier—when you spent most of your time planetside living under a mile of rock, it very easy to get acclimated to artificial schedules controlled by artificial light, and the transition to whatever time of day the gate happened to dump you out into wasn’t quite so jarring. Here... Evan wasn’t going to deny there were some _beautiful_ , breathtaking views that he thoroughly intended to paint when he got the chance, _if he got the chance_ , but being topside and sitting in the middle of a freaking ocean no less, meant they were exposed to the planet’s day and night cycle. That, in turn, gave the base a natural schedule, and made it that much harder for those who found themselves working outside its rhythm. 

“Here.”

Evan blinked. No, those were still his workout clothes seeming to hover in place six or so inches from his face. He blinked again, and the blur behind his clothes resolved into David and David’s hand holding up the clothes. Evan reached out tentatively, finding his joints stiff and painful in a way he hadn’t expected, and carefully, oh-so-gingerly, stood and let David help him into the clothes.

He felt better when the warm, soft, familiar fabric was against his skin, but he still felt too exposed too...

“You’re not a monster, Evan,” David said softly, sitting down on the end of his bed, leaving plenty of space between him and Evan and talking to him like one might speak to a skittish colt. Slow, soothing tone, small movements, nothing too fancy..

“What?” Evan asked in surprise, head jerking up.

“In your dreams. What makes you shift, it’s a need to _protect_ , to fight back. You aren’t trying to _hurt_ people. You’re not the dragon from fairytales. You’re not breathing fire everywhere and hell-bent on destruction. You’re hurt and hurting alone and desperate, and you want it to stop. You don’t want to be back there anymore, and you finally figured out what you can do and how to fight back.” David’s tone was impassioned, and he was leaning forward, closing the distance between himself and Evan.

“How do you—” Evan asked, throat suddenly dry and cracking. He’d been afraid of this, but he hadn’t even allowed himself to entertain the possibility...

“I was there. I saw your dreams. Felt them. I thought, the first night. The first time, maybe I was imagining it, but today—even though I wasn’t here in the room with you, I still saw it. The waterboarding, that was Iraq?” David asked.

Evan found himself nodding hesitantly. “I don’t—”

“And the place with the prisons, rock, all the pain. That was when you were with the SGC, held captive off world.” It didn’t sound like an answer.

“Dr. Parrish—”

“It’s David, you know that.”

“David, whatever you think you saw...” Evan gulped, trying to keep the bile from rising into his mouth. _How could he know? Could he really have seen?_ His heart was pounding in his chest, and he wasn’t even sure why. He could chalk it up to the sudden, protective _urges_ he seemed to be having, but why he had those and why they were aimed at a hyper-talkative botanist, he had no idea.

“I know a lot of you military types think we scientists aren’t particularly street smart or worldly wise. You think we don’t know combat or war. You think we’re delicate, gentle even. Some of you see that as a good thing, a benefit, something to protect, and some of you see that as a weakness, something to be ridiculed.”

Evan opened his mouth to protest, but David cut him off with a wave of his hand.

“I’m not accusing you. Just stating a fact,” David frowned. “But here’s another fact for you. Those of us who’ve been with the program for a while, even the people who only worked at the SGC and never went offworld, we’re not _stupid_ , and we’re certainly not naive. We’ve seen what war looks like. We know PTSD when we see it, so don’t insult me and everything I and every other scientist that has worked and bled and died for this program by pretending we don’t know what _pain_ looks like!” David finished with an exclamation, but hushed, so his words wouldn’t carry beyond the room. So only Evan would hear.

“How—how did you—”

“I saw what you dreamed. I was there, in your mind, or you were in mine. I felt how... terrified you were, and I think—” David’s voice became small and even quieter. “I think you sensed me. Thought it was going to happen to me. And you—you were already upset, already feeling protective, but that.. Somehow it pushed you over the edge, or at least... that’s what it looked like from where I was sitting.”

“It wasn’t—there was no _one_ place like that. It was echoes of memories—being hunted by the Goa’uld, a conflict with the Unas, seeing friends killed, and yes, being held captive offworld. I—” he swallowed, not quite sure why he was explaining himself to a teammate he was still only just getting to know, but he needed to, and if David really had seen, if he was there in Evan’s mind... “The dreams always come, but not every night. They were getting better, less frequent when I was at the SGC. They got worse after my first exposure to the Wraith, and then, better again, but now they’re coming almost every night. It’s like the longer I’m here, the more I feel driven to—”

The door chimed causing Evan and David to turn their heads in synchronicity. Panic flared in Evan’s gut. Having David in his room like this _looked_ bad. I didn’t matter that they hadn’t been doing anything, if someone wanted to make a problem out of it, they could. The SGC usually turned a blind eye towards enforcement of DADT, but there were limits to what could be ignored. Right now, with him barely dressed and in bed with no good explanation about why a botanist was in his quarters... He was half-tempted to ask David to hide in the bathroom, but that would just make them look guiltier. Evan knew he was probably over thinking it, his fear of discovery over the recent transformations coupling with his guilt over the reality of his burgeoning feelings for David were combining to blur his perspective. “We’re on the same team. If anyone asks why you’re here, it’s something mission-related—or maybe you had a suggestion about mission subjects!”

David cocked his head to the side, but Evan got the idea he wasn’t exactly listening, at least not to _him_. After a moment, he straightened up, looked Evan in the eyes, and relaxed. “It’s okay,” he said, with an inexplicable smile, and crossed the distance to the door to open it, as the chime sounded a second time.

“No, wait—” Evan protested in a half-whisper as his eyes fell upon the crumpled dent that had appeared in the wall across from the door after his first transformation. He’d tried to stretch his wings and had slammed into the wall, hard. He hadn’t had time to do anything about it—nor could he even fathom who to ask—and it certainly looked suspicious... 

But it was too late. David was already opening the door. 

Evan wasn’t sure who he had been expecting, but seeing Lt. Col. Sheppard and Dr. McKay standing on the other side looking grave and excited in turns was definitely not on his list of possibilities.

“We need to talk,” Sheppard said.

“I’m sorry, about, what, exactly?” Evan asked, genuinely uncertain. He could feel his heart pounding in his chest, his pulse raising, the itch between his skin telling him to change, shift, change _now_ , because his other form was safer, more defensible.

Sheppard opened his mouth to talk, but it was McKay who spoke.

“Oh for fuck’s sake, Sheppard, what are you? An idiot? Are you trying to terrify him into lying? Stop being stupid!”

“Rodney!” John complained, drawing McKay’s name out so it seemed to have two or three extra syllables.

As scoff was McKay’s reply, followed by him bodily moving John, placing his hands around John’s upper arms to pull him to the side, inside Evan’s room. The door finally closed with a _swish_ , and Evan watched as Rodney concentrated on it, setting the emergency lock.

“Oh, hi David,” McKay said, apparently noticing David for the first time. “Are you— _oh_ , yeah that makes sense. Hmm we should have asked Carson to—” McKay began babbling, speaking in incomplete sentences that didn’t make any sense from Evan’s perspective.

“Rodney!” Sheppard said again, this time it came out between a hiss and a command.

“Oh, right, sorry,” McKay responded, turning to John. “Well did you want to—”

“Not particularly,” Sheppard muttered under his breath.

“Can I, help you with something?” Evan asked. He was a bit shaken by Sheppard’s antics, unsure what he could have done that would merit such a discombobulated response... but then again Sheppard was his CO and either suspected violation of DADT _or_ learning Evan had transformed into an evil, world-destroying Dragon might put Sheppard a little off his game.

“Possibly,” Sheppard replied, taking a moment to collect himself. “Have you, possibly... Have you had any experiences lately that were... out of the ordinary?” Sheppard’s tone was sheepish and he couldn’t quite meet Evan’s eye. 

At first, Evan thought it was embarrassment, but then he saw something _else_ , something he hadn’t expected... Sheppard looked _afraid_. 

_He knows, or he suspects. He knows I’m a Dragon, and he’s terrified of me. I’m fucked..._

While Sheppard was struggling to find words and Evan was busy freaking out, neither of them were paying much attention to McKay or David, and they, Evan would realize later, were having a nonverbal conversation of their own.

“It’s okay, Evan, it’s really, really okay,” David said softly a split second before McKay blurted out, “Look, we know you’ve been turning into a Dragon, and that you’re sharing a telepathic connection with Parrish over here, and we think we know why!”

~~~

Of course Rodney had been overstating it quite a bit when he said they knew _why_. It was more like they had a theory and a whole lot of, Rodney had been reluctant to admit, squishy, soft science data and coincidences that made their theory particularly plausible, but the whole thing was still held together with chewing gum and a prayer... maybe duct tape, if they were lucky. The real driving force behind it was an instinctive sensation of _knowing_ that exceeded and transcended any sort of gut instinct John—or Rodney—had ever felt before. Lorne and Parrish had the same reaction when Rodney told them—John knew because he’d _felt_ it. They were hoping Carson would share their realization, although they weren’t sure. For all they knew the deep sense of knowing would come only after Carson had shifted... After all, none of them had sensed each other or had even the faintest hint of telepathic communication with anything but the city before they’d shifted. But deep down they all knew they _needed_ to do this. The desire to protect was too strong. There were others like them, and the longer they went without knowing, they were all at risk.

~~~

Teyla’s quarters were comfortable, peaceful even. With lots of scented candles and flowing drapes and the gentle afternoon light streaming in the window, reflecting off the water, John could understand intellectually how it was the sort of place that should have been relaxing, meditative, even though his personality had never been particularly inclined towards that kind of behavior. Right now the beautiful space felt tight and cramped, and only a small part of that had anything to do with them cramming seven adults in the space. The rest was... hormones, he supposed, the stink and sweat and presence of seven people’s fears and anxieties. No matter how hard he tried to put himself at ease, there was just too much riding on the situation. _Execution. Loss of all rights. Public Shaming._ John might not be particularly close to his family, but some of the others undoubtedly were. And if not them, then the people like them on Earth. _Fuck!_ General O’Neill was a gene carrier. If that meant...

“Dragons,” Carson said, his voice somewhere between horrified, humorous, and incredulous. “Dragons, as in... as in...”

“Big, giant, winged lizards who fly, breathe fire, and destroy Wraith,” Ronon supplied, a grin in his voice.

“ _Dragons_ ,” Carson repeated as if he hadn’t heard Ronon. “As in the most destructive, evil force, in our planet’s history. Completely outlawed in more than 120 countries. Must be shot on sight. Or Dragons as in _psychosis draconis_ , one of the most feared forms of mental illness the mere suspicion of which until 1976 was grounds in your bloody country to commit people for life without hope of release and still carries the death penalty in 40 of your states.” He was staring straight ahead, unblinking, barely breathing.

“Dragons were the protectors of the peoples of the Pegasus galaxy,” Teyla supplied, “stories are told of how they were the faithful guardians of the Ancestors who for thousands of years, capable of destroying Hive ships with a single breath, swiping darts from the sky with the stroke of a claw, protecting life and honoring the Ancestors with their service.” 

John noticed she was looking very closely at Carson, expectantly, as if maybe the right words would snap him out of the horrified fugue state into which he’d slipped shortly after entering the room.

“Dragons are _not_ protectors!” He shouted at Teyla. “They don’t bloody _save_ human beings. They destroy. Cities. Towns. They lay waste to entire countries and they _kill._ “

“How do we know that?” Rodney asked, his voice whisper-soft.

“They are our most feared... monsters in all of Earth’s history. They’ve been believed extinct for over a century and now you, our _military leaders_ are saying you’ve bloody well gone and turned into one? Are you _mad_? Even if you’re just saying you _think_ you’re a dragon, the psychosis... you’ll be looking at the end of your commission. I don’t even have the facilities to treat this here. I don—”

“How do we know Dragons are evil?” Rodney said again, louder, cutting Carson off mid-sentence, and imbuing his voice with an edge that sent a shiver down John’s spine, and had him sitting up stock straight.

“P—pardon?” Carson stammered after a moment. “We know because it’s recorded everywhere. Dragons are _evil_.”

“But how do we know?”

“You ever heard of the Great Fire of London? Dragon. The Great Chicago fire? Dragon! Even some of the damage at Pompeii was caused by Dragons. The accounts saw them _swooping_ over the city. Terrorizing the people!” Carson explained as if Rodney were a particularly stupid child being dense just to piss off the adults.

“How do we know the Dragon wasn’t trying to help?” Parrish asked this time.

“Yeah,” Rodney nodded. “Or how about a Dragon-related catastrophe _before_ they were hunted. Sure, we know Dragons are destructive now. But those Dragons were being hunted for being evil. They were provoked, cornered, acting out of self-preservation. Where are the stories of the Dragons that ran amok, killed without provocation, laid waste to countries for the hell of it?” 

“What else would they do?” Carson asked, his voice growing louder. “They’re our worst enemy—”

“But they’re not the worst,” Lorne said quietly.

And John felt that final piece slip into place. “The Goa’uld.”

“Excuse me?” Carson asked at the same time Rodney said “Oh,” and Parrish, “What?”

“Dragons are not the worst enemy we’ve faced on Earth. Those would be the Goa’uld. I don’t know of any stories of Dragons laying waste to the countryside before the early Egyptian dynasties, do you?” John explained.

Carson thought for a moment, the wind temporarily out of his sails. “Well, no, but we don’ really have much from that time anyway, so that hardly—”

“Except, why would we know they were horrible and dangerous if they hadn’t done anything?” Rodney protested.

“Look, let’s start over,” John tried, speaking up again. “You can believe us or not, decide we’re crazy or not. Even try to commit us when you’re done, but just hear me out. You found something in my blood, an abnormality. You found the same abnormality in Major Lorne’s blood. The abnormality showed up after both of us had transformed for the first time. We’re both natural gene carriers. We both _shifted_ into Dragons when we felt particularly threatened. My team and I were cornered at the edge of a cliff, about to be run off it or eaten by a group of pursuing Wraith. Rodney slipped, the Wraith was going to feed on him, and it was more than I could take.” John looked expectantly at Lorne, hoping he would find the strength to be honest. They were both already putting themselves _out there_ so thoroughly, to ask him to go even further...

“I had a flashback, in a dream, only in the dream, D—David was the one being tortured instead of me. I couldn’t take it. I had to do something, and when I woke up, I was hovering five feet over the bed,” Lorne admitted. “It had happened before, but… I kept it a secret.”

“And after our transformation we both found we could communicate... telepathically, at least with the person we were trying to protect,” John explained.

“Dr. Parrish and I both had the gene therapy. We can sense each other’s thoughts too, and to a lesser extent both understand the other, uh, Dragon,” Rodney added. “That’s why we asked you to look at my blood work too.”

Carson’s face went a little sour at that.

“You found something!” John breathed, leaning forward at the end of Teyla’s bed. 

“I found an abnormality, yes, but not quite the same as what I found in your samples,” Carson admitted, glancing first at John, then Lorne. 

“We think the telepathy is a side effect of the gene therapy. In developing the treatment we managed to give people the gene that assists with _communication._ So we can communicate with Ancient machinery and yeah, even with Dragons, but we don’t have _all_ of the Ancient genes, so we can’t transform,” Rodney explained. “It _fits_. It fits what happened to us. It fits the Pegasus mythologies about Dragons. Hell, if you think about it, it even fits what we know about Earth,” Rodney coaxed.

“Dr. Beckett, the Goa’uld lied to us all the time. When the Ancients left the Milky Way the first time, the Goa’uld were nowhere in sight. But 10,000 years ago, when the Ancients fled the Wraith war and landed back on Earth, Ra was there. So were the other System Lords. If the ancients tried to help, the Goa’uld would have started rumors. Told us Dragons were evil and to be feared. They would have used the power from posing as our gods to make sure we complied. Anyone who tried to fight back would be branded a terrorist, or worse, a _monster._ The Goa’uld were very successful in getting humanity to believe all kinds of blatant falseholds. Why not one more? The Goa’uld may have been so successful, people were convinced Dragons were evil. Humans wouldn’t have needed any further prodding or reminders or threats from the snakes to believe Dragons were their enemies too. Dragons _are_ dangerous.” Rodney glanced around nervously, “I mean no offense to present company, it’s just a fact. Dragons are strong, big, they have claws, they breathe fire, and they can fly. Piss one off and you could have a catastrophe on your hands. If a Dragon set out to do harm, they could accomplish it. People were too primed for hatred to realize or even consider that Dragons were good, or potential allies, or even neutral, or that they could help humanity solve a lot of problems. Dragons are dangerous the way geniuses are dangerous. They’re not inherently bad, but the potential is there if they want to do something truly evil.”

“Would not the Goa’uld have seen it to their advantage if your people believed Dragons were evil even long after they left?” Teyla asked, piping into the conversation for the first time since she’d shared the Athosian myths about Dragons. “They would need people to be afraid so they would not listen or communicate with the Dragons. Otherwise the Dragons in your galaxy could have potentially brought the fight to the Goa’uld. Everything John and Rodney have explained about the Goa’uld tells me they would have laid the roots of distrust and hatred very deep. They would not risk your people learning the truth. But now Carson, you must look past this, and look into yourself to see the truth.”

The room was silent for a moment, and John was keenly aware of footsteps in the hall outside, the occasional creak or shudder of the tower as it shifted in the wind, the heavy breathing and rapid heart rates of those around him.

“Me?” Carson asked at last. “What do I have to do with this, love?”

Rodney scoffed.

Lorne flinched.

Parrish crossed his arms.

Ronon rolled his eyes.

It was up to John to give a coherent answer. “You’re a natural gene carrier,” he said softly.

“Excuse me?” Carson asked. 

“You’re going to turn into a Dragon too,” John murmured.

“I am bloody well—”

“Carson, get with the program here,” Rodney interjected, impatient. “John and Major Lorne have both transformed—and in Major Lorne’s case it’s happened more than once. They’re both natural gene carriers. If they inherited this from the Ancients along with the ATA gene, then chances are, you did too. The same goes for all the other natural gene carriers on the city, like Markham, Miko, and the others. Right now we don’t know what turned people on, or why, and we need to find out. We need to find out, and reach out, and make sure we have answers before people panic. Because if any of us get exposed, we _all_ get exposed. That means all the artificial gene carriers too—if Dr. Parrish and I are telepathic with Dragons, chances are it’s true of everyone who took the gene therapy successfully. Everyone we treat could wind up sharing mental space with us, and that’s a huge risk.”

Rodney paused to take a breath, and John reached out to squeeze his hand in reassurance. 

“Dr. Beckett, I know what it is like to realize you share heritage with your greatest enemy,” Teyla said softly. “But if I can learn to accept, even value the gift my Wraith DNA has given me, can you not open your mind and see what a gift the Ancestors have bestowed upon you?”

“Al’righ’ lass, you have a point,” Carson conceded.

~~~

_**Chapter 6:** _

_In classical times, the term “Dragon” also referred to giant serpents. In fact, since the discovery of the Goa’uld many anthropologists have wondered if humanity’s innate fear of Dragons was directly related to their fear of snakes, which in turn, was believed to be an evolutionary response to the Goa’uld._

_Although scientists debate whether enough time has elapsed since the Goa’uld arrived on Earth and the present for selection pressures to work their magic so evolution actually _favors_ individuals who fear snakes, most lay people believe the Goa’uld to be directly connected._

_As for Dragons, the etymological origins have long convinced the masses the same is true. After all, Dragons have been the enemy of humanity at least as long as the Goa’uld._

_Pestilence, fires, earthquakes, floods. All have been blamed on Dragons—either collectively or specific individual Dragons throughout history. Some of the stories are quite credible, accompanied by eyewitness accounts, sketches, and in later years, photographs of the Dragons in question. However, some of the stories smack of hyperbole and more closely resemble fanciful legends than hard fact. Still other accounts appear to be the result of the populace’s hyperactive imagination. Since Dragons are so feared they became the perfect scapegoat for almost any happening, with even the mere accusation of being a Dragon tends to carry a hefty penalty. Many of these stories now appear to be clear cases of persecution rather than actual Dragon accounts._

_The last known accused Dragon was executed in 1859 in Kansas. The Dragon—a young woman in human guise—was burned at the stake after much dispute and debate. The State won out, using the traditional stake burning that dates back to the “Dragon trials” of the 17th century, instead of the firing squad prescribed under then United States federal law. As a matter of compromise the execution counsel opted to shoot the charred remains of the Dragon’s corpse to ensure the creature could not regenerate._

_Although long believed extinct (the 1859 case was the most recent recorded Dragon sighting in any country prior to the Reemergence in 2006, and the question of the alleged Dragon’s identity as a Dragon remains in question to this day), many countries still have “Dragon Laws” on their books. The United States removed its federal prohibition in 1997. While it appears Congress intended to put an end to _all_ Dragon laws, and legal scholars often argue that the remaining state prohibitions are preempted and unenforceable, 47 of the 50 states steadfastly maintain Dragon Laws in their codes._

_Since the Reemergence, these state laws remain an obstacle for Dragons living in or wishing to return to the United States. Even though the Supreme Court of the United States has declared such statutes unconstitutional and the UN has pled for their repeal, some states and municipalities insist on carrying them out. An example of the severe consequences of such selective unlawful enforcement can be seen in the State of Colorado, where the international agency known as the IOA seized control of a U.S. Air Force base as a prophylactic measure in 2010. What few people know, and has only recently been declassified is that this takeover happened at the request of the Pentagon._

_From the Memoirs of Daniel Jackson, Ph.D._

~~~

Elizabeth Weir was a mystery to those around her. Sure, they knew the face she presented to the public—former head of the SGC, dedicated and effective leader of the Atlantis Expedition, talented diplomat, skilled negotiator, gifted linguist—but ask someone what Elizabeth’s _opinions_ were on a particular subject, and you’d likely be met with an impenetrable wall and a blank expression. 

Everyone knew Elizabeth had her own research in addition to the duties as leader of the expedition. Everyone knew it had something to do with the Ancients and _Ancient_ as a language, but no one seemed to know any more details. Chuck had started a betting pool during the first year and the most common theories were: negotiating tactics, scientific developments, designing a “universal translator,” and ascension. Most people seemed to think Elizabeth was specifically researching ascension, but were split about 50/50 on whether she was interested in learning _how_ humans could ascend or figuring out _why_ the Ancients had decided to ascend.

One person had guessed Elizabeth’s research had something to do with Ancient myths and legends, but that individual never did explain the basis for their theory. Whatever Elizabeth’s research was actually about, it was certainly a resource hog. She went query after query to the Ancient database, checking again and again as the data slowly compiled and the database grudgingly surrendered its secrets.

Rodney’s command to his fellow telepaths and Dragons of “Whatever we do, don’t tell Elizabeth,” turned out to be much more difficult in practice than he or John had anticipated. When it came time for their full mission debrief the next morning—and _boy_ had Elizabeth been pissed when she discovered they’d spent an afternoon “resting” on Carson’s orders before telling her they had recovered ZPMs—Elizabeth proved she might well be the largest obstacle to the Dragons’ continued safety.

 _Dr. Weir_ was _nosy_. Yes, it was in her job description, but lately she seemed to be asking questions upon questions. Poking and prodding at every possible avenue. 

And now, she didn’t seem to like John’s explanation of what had happened on P2C-M36, and she apparently found the other members of AR-1’s reports similarly lacking. She asked for clarifications and supplemental reports on three separate occasions. When she wasn’t satisfied, she went to Carson and asked if there was any sort of _medical_ or environmental explanation that would account for the team’s apparent unexpected victory over the Wraith. 

Rodney accused her of implying that they couldn’t hold their own against the Wraith or fight them off.

“I’m implying nothing of the kind, Rodney. I just want to know if there is a tool, strategy, or resource we could be using against the Wraith that we haven’t known until now,” Elizabeth explained. “You have to admit, your escape was very fortuitous.”

“I don’t know about fortuitous, more like lots of training deployed at an opportune time,” John deflected.

“And you’re sure everyone is okay,” Elizabeth asked looking pointedly at John. “I know Dr. Becket held you in his office for extra testing.”

“Yes, Dr. Weir, he was just making a point. Carson wanted to ensure we all got checked out after our encounter and didn’t try to use debriefs as a way to defer seeking medical attention,” John said, stubbornly. 

“Mostly he noticed John’s wristband was gone, and wanted to make sure he didn’t have to taunt him for being forgetful!” Rodney replied. 

“Rodney!” John protested, and it was just that, a protest. 

“Well it’s true John. You got your stupid wrist scraped up on the edge of the cliff and lost your wrist band. It was pretty freaking obvious!” Rodney raised an eyebrow at John and then glanced around the room, his eyes stopping on Elizabeth.

“Rodney,” John said, reaching out to ensure he was reading Rodney correctly. “I wasn’t acting like a foolish hero. I was trying to keep us from falling. As I recall, you spent some of the fight flailing on the ground.” It hurt to play it that way. After all, it was the sight of Rodney knocked to the ground by hungry Wraith that finally flipped the switch inside him and triggered his first transformation.

But what else could they do? Elizabeth was an unknown quantity. Her fascination with the Ancients and her leadership position coupled to make her particularly dangerous. 

Luckily, she seemed to accept John and Rodney’s bickering and eventually let the issue drop.

Or at least she seemed to. As far as John was concerned, she continued to asked far too many questions about the mission that had nothing to do with the five ZPMs they’d discovered—two of which were completely full, while the other three had partial charges—or the schematics they now had to _build_ more.

~~~

Three days after the Dragons’ first _outing_ to each other, they met for another hushed conversation in Teyla’s quarters.

Rodney was relieved when it happened. He’d been convinced John was going to just sit and fester. Not accepting or coming to terms with the new knowledge they’d gained.

But it was _Carson_ who called the meeting, going to great lengths to surreptitiously request their presence.

“I transformed last night,” Carson said, sounding morose. “One minute I was standing on a balcony overlooking the East Pier, wrestling with my conscience about deciding not to turn you lot in, and the next thing I know I’m six feet off the bloody ground flapping my wings! It was terrible.”

“It can’t have been that bad, Carson,” Rodney prodded, nudging his shoulder gently. “At least this time you didn’t accidentally launch drones at anyone.”

Carson looked at him murderously.

“What Rodney means,” Teyla interjected, “is that it is fortunate you have come into your heritage so smoothly. Your transformation could have been far more difficult, or traumatic.”

“Well, whatever, let’s just say I believe you now. And I think you’re probably right. But before I go ‘round to other folks with the ATA gene and tell them they’re bloody Dragons, I need to know why, and _how_ this is happening,” Carson said, resting his head in his hands.

Rodney sighed and looked at John pointedly. “Do you remember that lab we ran through during the Siege?” 

“We must have run through a few dozen labs, Rodney,” John replied, annoyed.

“It was after the Wraith found us and cut us off from using the transporter we were supposed to use. They chased us, they were gaining on us, and suddenly you just _took off_. You said you didn’t know where the nearest transporter was, but somehow you got us there. Right before the transporter, we ran through a room. On the way into the room only the lights were on. After you ran through, you saw a blue light blinking on a strange machine.” Rodney explained.

“I’d forgotten that,” John admitted. “You noticed that?”

“No, _you_ noticed that, and thought it was odd. Then you forgot about it. But you dreamed about it last night, so I did too,” Rodney explained. “I say we go looking for the lab, find some answers. Then we make sure all the Dragons are on the same page.”

~~~

It was easily the three dozenth room they’d come to since they began their search. It was a tiny lab, and the Ancient database had almost no information on its purpose or use. As such, it had been almost at the bottom of the list in terms of the scientists’ priorities in exploration and use, and if John hadn’t set out to find it (again), it might have been years before anyone got around to checking it out. 

But the room was instantly familiar to John. Now that he was there again, he remembered being guided there, as if by an unseen hand. And sure enough, in the corner of the room, partially built into a wall, was a machine unlike any John had seen elsewhere on Atlantis. And sure enough, it was glowing blue.

No sooner had John stepped into the room than the slightly transparent form of what he could only assume was an Ascended Ancient materialized in front of them. It looked very like Chaya had appeared when she had revealed herself, only kinder.

“Bloody hell,” Carson exclaimed, followed by a crash.

John spun on his heel to find Carson clutching the wall for support, having apparently collapsed against it in shock.

“Welcome, home,” the figure said.

“Ancestor,” Teyla said, giving a gracious bow.

Ronon dipped his head reverently.

“You must gather the others. There is no time to waste,” the figure responded, somberly, staring straight at John when she spoke. “Gather the others, and I will provide you with the information you seek.” This time she directed her piercing gaze at Carson. Then just as quickly as she had appeared, she vanished.

“Is that good enough for you, Carson?” Rodney asked. “Can we please talk to the other Dragons now?”

“Aye,” Carson replied.

Rodney glanced at John.

John nodded and tapped his earpiece, careful to select the private channel. Even with encryption they had to be very, very careful. “Sheppard to Lorne, over.”

“Lorne here,” Evan’s voice answered.

“Major can you please convene that briefing for 1500 on the East Pier?”

“1500 sir?” Evan asked, somewhat surprised.

“Carson finally agreed. So, we’ve decided to move up the schedule. Can you please make sure everyone is there?” John asked.

“One all-hands ATA training session coming up at your request,” Evan replied, the relief in his voice apparent.

“Sheppard out.”

~~~

Two hours later every ATA-positive individual on Atlantis, plus Teyla and Ronon were gathered on the East Pier stumbling through the same revelations John, Evan, and the others had endured a few days before. 

It wasn’t going that well—especially not since Kate Heightmeyer (artificial gene carrier) had started saying, “Dragons?” over and over again and putting everyone on edge.

Teyla was scowling. 

Ronon’s finger was hovering over the trigger of his energy pistol—John just hoped he had it set to stun.

Rodney’s jaw was clenching.

John was starting to panic.

But then everything changed.

“I have transformed. I have been transforming for months. Since Colonel Sheppard returned from Earth. I am a Dragon, and I am not ashamed,” Dr. Kusanagi said, her voice wavering a little, but her eyes clear, and expression resolute.

After that, people had started opening up. It seemed at least three quarters of the Dragons had transformed at least once (and John could _feel_ that a few more had transformed, but weren’t ready to admit it to themselves or anyone else yet), and everyone with the ATA gene, natural or artificial, had started exhibiting telepathic abilities. 

Tensions escalated again, until, just as suddenly as she had in the lab, the Ascended Ancient appeared again, hushing everyone around her.

“Greetings, my fellow Lanteans, and welcome home,” she said spreading her hands wide. “We have waited for so long for this day to come, and now it is here. Now Dragons shall fly in Pegasus, and we shall finally defeat the Wraith.”

“Holy crap!” Evan exclaimed. 

“Most of all,” she turned to John, “We would like to thank you, John Sheppard, for making this possible. We called out for you, and your mind answered. From the moment you set foot on the city we knew that one of our own had finally come home,” the figure’s image rippled, and John thought she looked sad. “We soon realized that your mind was closed to us, at least partly. You had been turned _off_ just like every other child of our progeny that we had found. But we could tell it had not always been so. Your mind had once been opened and free. And that made all the difference in the world.”

“Open and free?” Rodney asked doubtful, crossing his arms and effecting his best pout. “What are you saying, that John was born an Ancient and he what, forgot?”

“Yes,” the Ancient nodded looking encouraged, “but not forgot, not exactly. Do you remember the chamber you ran through as you fled the Wraith?”

“I don’t see what the bloody hell it matters if he remembers a room when the Wraith were on his heels!” Carson protested.

John could feel a sort of protective anxiety rolling off of Carson that would have been comforting if he didn’t think it was going to have the wrong effect on their Ancient visitor.

But she didn’t rise to the bait. She inclined her head towards Carson and stared intently at John, translucent blue-grey eyes boring into his soul with greater precision than a laser. 

“She means the room where we saw her earlier, Dr. Beckett,” John explained. To the figure, he answered, “I didn’t, not then, but now… it felt like something in my head got… lighter?” John asked. “We were in a lab.”

Rodney started snapping his fingers urgently. “Yes! It was right before we found the transporter. I remember feeling relieved after that, but it was more like my brain had more _space_ ,” he gestured with his hands. “I thought I was happy we made it to a working transporter, but the feeling began before that! There was something blue and… glowing there.” He snapped again. “It wasn’t glowing when we came in, but John ran by it and it started!”

“You _noticed_ something in a _lab_ start glowing when I ran by, and you didn’t _say_ anything about it?” John asked, turning to Rodney with a mixture of horror and shock.

“Well, it wasn’t exactly important at the time was it? I mean, I’m not exactly known for being able to pass up a scientific curiosity even at really inappropriate moments, but right then, I was much more worried about not dropping the ZPM and avoiding becoming Wraith chow.” Rodney blushed, sheepishly, rubbing at his sternum. “I would have said something, but I was so tired, John, I didn’t even remember it until now. I think at the time, I figured if it was a big deal it would make itself known to us in some way. And when nothing exploded or went haywire, and then we got recalled to Earth and nothing happened when we were away, I let it go. I wasn’t really sure I hadn’t imagined it,” he added.

“The room was…” she paused as if searching for words. Soon her expression brightened and her spectral face seemed to brighten and solidify as a smile spread across her faith. “It was sort of a ‘danger room’ within which Ancient children and adolescents could begin to develop their control over telepathy, telekinesis, shifting, and other advanced skills and do so in safety. The room houses a machine called the Guardian whose purpose was to ‘unlock’ the minds of those youngsters whose primary telepathy channels had been closed for their own safety when they were younger.” She blinked, her expression almost apologetic. 

“When John, ran through the room, the Guardian woke from its long slumber. Like all of you, John has what you call the ‘ATA’ gene. But this is much more than a simple gene and accomplishes so much more than allowing you to access our people’s technology. But unlike the rest of you, with John, the Guardian sensed a familiar pattern, sensing a mind born free, now locked for safety, projecting desperation through his secondary telepathic pathways in an instinctive response to a full-scale, city-wide emergency. The Guardian responded as it was intended, “it unlocked John and activated its own emergency mode, which broadcast the stimulus to ‘unlock’ every locked mind in the city. It did not matter that the Guardian could not have responded to a request from the rest of your minds, because it works through the secondary telepathic pathways, the part of your ‘ATA’ gene that was active. Of course rather than a bunch of young children whose minds had been locked to keep them from breaking walls when shifting or setting the drapes on fire, the Guardian has now unlocked all of you—adults who had no idea of their heritage. All of you _thought_ you were human. The Guardian released your form and transformed many into the… Dragons you really are. We—” she broke off, her form blurring. 

All around the pier people shifted. No one spoke, no one moved their feet. All were waiting, awkwardly but intent on hearing her out. After all, it an Ascended Ancient, one of those pesky evasive “others” of whom Chaya had spoken, was standing in front of them, offering an explanation. John supposed no one dared breathe too loudly lest she disappear and decide to leave them hanging. Actually, come to think of it, that was the sort of behavior he’d come to expect from Ancients in the relatively short time he’d been part of the Stargate Program.

But the woman did not disappear, and she didn’t leave them hanging. After wiping away what seemed to be tears, she continued. “We never imagined that humanity would hate or fear our other form. We are sorry for the pain and sorrow this has caused you, but we do not regret that it has happened. Millennia ago, when the war was all but lost, those of us who ascended and remained here tied to this galaxy, separated from our sisters and brothers by the vastness of spacetime, did so in the hope, the belief, that one day our people would return and bring with them an answer—the missing link that had eluded us for so long. We are just fortunate that the Wraith did not understand what you had found or recognize your awakening minds for what they truly were, or they might have succeeded in killing you all before you had the time to learn to use your power.” Cora smiled glanced around at all of them.

The silence that followed was awkward, but no one seemed willing to speak, least of all John who could feel eyes boring into the back of his head. People were staring at him, blaming him for what happened. He had been stupid he had given in—he had…

But suddenly there was another spectral form in the room, standing close to him, one that resembled his mother so closely that if not for subtle differences, he would have thought it was her ghost. John opened his mouth in surprise, but no one else seemed to notice, no one else but Rodney, who had been looking at John and was now staring at the other… woman… with perplexed interest. 

“No John, you were not wrong. You were right. You listened. Some of us have always watched out for you, and you did the only thing that could have saved your people. All of them. Had you not listened, had you not had faith in yourself, everyone on Atlantis would have perished.” 

Although the figure spoke, her words were an echo in John’s mind, and just as suddenly as she appeared, she vanished.

In the time John had been distracted, someone found the courage to speak. 

“Pardon me if I’m being stupid, but what about the rest of us? How are we seeing you and talking to people in our heads if we’re not Dragons?” Dr. Parrish asked.

“You are the ones we hoped for. The connection. The missing link. The bridge for the gap. We had not figured out how to give humans the skills they needed to communicate with _us_ in all our forms while retaining human responses to Wraith,” she answered.

“Pardon?” Cadman asked blinking.

“What you call the ATA gene happens to give you telepathic abilities, but it does not have any mutagenic or transformative qualities,” the figure explained as if her words were making perfect sense.

Everyone just stared.

Well, not everyone. John was pretty sure he understood what she was saying, and he wasn’t exactly thrilled with the implications. 

Carson was looking at her with his head tilted to one side, expressions battling on his face, torn between fascination at the genetic implications and horrified by the apparent inhumanity.

But Rodney, Rodney was staring at their Ascended guest, eyes wide and mouth open. John knew that expression, any moment now Rodney was going to—

“One, the question you answered wasn’t the question she asked,” Rodney burst out, thrusting his jaw at Cadman and ticking off points on his fingers. “Two, are you actually trying to imply that you couldn’t develop a gene therapy to give humans telepathic abilities on your own? And three, what the fuck took you so long? Why have you been sitting around with your thumbs up your ass for the last ten thousand years? Do you really expect me to believe you didn’t understand what was happening on Earth? And now you’re telling us, what, that everyone here who’s a Dragon had parents or grandparents who switched their kids’ minds off and never turned them back on again?”

“Rodney,” John whispered, reaching out to still Rodney’s flailing even as his words cut deep. 

“No, John, I will _not_ let it be. Every time we’ve run into Ancients all we hear is how our minds can’t handle how awesome they are. We’re just not smart enough. Advanced enough. We can’t comprehend their knowledge. It’s insulting. And now they just show up and tell us hey thanks for solving our problems, come fight the Wraith for us? I’m not buying it.” Rodney shook his head emphatically. Turning back to the Ancient woman, he said “You hear that, Ms. Glowstick? Fess up!”

The figure lowered her eyes. For a few moments her shape grew so faint John was afraid Rodney had scared her away. Part of him wanted to scold Rodney, to cry out and ask her to stay, because if what she was saying was true, if the image he—and Rodney—had seen a moment ago really was (and he was still guessing) one of his mother’s ancestors, if he had been a Dragon as a child… then so much of his childhood made sense. And right now he was so desperate for answers. But the rest of him was angry, and he knew Rodney was angry _for_ him, and that anger wouldn’t let him give in and beg.

But the figure stabilized, became more solid again, and looked up, her expression suitably chagrined. “Rodney is correct,” she said. 

“What?” Rodney, John, and Lorne asked at the same time.

“I am?” Rodney added. “I mean I know I am, I just didn’t expect you to admit it.”

John was again tempted to glare at him, but resisted.

“Over the years, many of our kind have cultivated a… superiority complex. We see you as children, young, inexperienced, and allowed that prejudice to cloud our judgment and rule our interactions. What is true is that all the knowledge we can hold in our Ascended form cannot fit into the brains of sentient beings in the physical realm. That was not a lie.” 

“So why did you have trouble engineering telepathic humans?” Carson demanded. “If you don’t mind my asking,” he added hastily.

“It is not as simple as you might think. You had an advantage we did not.” 

John didn’t like it. She said she’d answer, but here she was still being cryptic. And she hadn’t had the decency to even tell them her name.

“I am sorry, John, I did not mean to be so evasive. My name is Cora, and the others have elected me as their… spokesperson. Please forgive our missteps. We are somewhat out of practice of having this sort of interaction.” She smiled, and John realized she was nervous—nervous and excited. 

“Huh, a nervous ancient, who would have thought?” Rodney muttered.

“You hear us, our thoughts,” Miko blurted.

“Yes,” Cora answered, smiling wider. “And in time, perhaps such communication will be easier for us all. But for now, we thought it was only fair to try to… explain in a context that was familiar to you. To give you the advantage.” She turned back to John. “I am sorry. I am not trying to be cryptic. There is just—so much to explain, it is difficult to know where to start.”

“The beginning’s usually a good place,” John snarked back, earning a groan from Rodney.

“You have to understand that what was done to you, John, was fairly rare in our time, and always temporary. It had not occurred to us to look to those children for answers. Perhaps—if we had more time or if the situation with the Wraith had not grown so desperate. So many of us had ascended already in hopes of passing on new insights… We were not at our best. We hoped returning to Earth would buy us the time— _breathing room_ —I think you might say. But the situation we found was not what we expected.”

“You mean the Goa’uld,” John said softly. “The Goa’uld were on Earth and they turned humanity against you.”

“Yes,” Cora nodded. “I was one of those who returned to Earth. When we arrived and realized what had happened, we tried to help, but everything we tried gave them more ammunition. So many of us fell, and our numbers were already diminished.” Her expression sorrowed, “but that is a long story for another time, and much of it you already know. The point is you are here. You have accomplished what we could not, and now you can finally step forth and assume your birthright.”

“Um, can we get back to the machine that uh, turned us all on?” Lorne asked.

Someone snickered.

John whirled around and glared, but everyone was silent.

“So, Sheppard—Sheppard’s mind was unlocked because he ran by it. I get that, and I think I understand what happened to Beckett and Dr. Kusanagi, and everyone else that was on Atlantis at the time, but what about me? What about David, or Captain Cadman, or the rest of us who came later? We weren’t there during the siege,” Lorne asked. “Is it because this machine, this Guardian, is still broadcasting?”

“In a way, yes.”

“So, if we shut it off, would it stop? Would we go back to normal?” Dr. Heightmeyer asked.

“As you are now, you will remain, unless you or someone else shuts down your primary telepathic pathways again. It is not an easy process for an adult, and it would make you, vulnerable,” Cora replied.

“Look, I don’t think you understand.” That was Dr. Simpson. “We’re turning into Dragons. And while that may be good for _you_ , it’s not good for us. You know Earth? That place you Ascended to escape, where the Goa’uld turned humans against Dragons. If we go home, they’ll kill us. On almost every planet in the Milky Way, Dragons are killed on sight. There are some places on Earth that have reduced the penalties, but that’s only because they think we’re all dead.”

“I understand your concern, but you came here to Atlantis to explore, to learn. When you first stepped through Stargate did you not realize you might not be able to return home. Your heritage is here. The people of _this_ galaxy need you,” Cora explained.

David rounded on her, looming despite his relatively slight frame and Cora’s transparency. “We can’t just leave everything and join your war. Some of us came here knowing we could go home. And what you don’t seem to understand is as long as there is a physical way for us to return home, the IOA and the SGC and everyone else on Earth is going to expect us to go home sometime. But if we’re like this we can’t _do_ that.”

“We’ll turn off the machine,” John said softly. “We’ll turn off the machine and figure out a way—”

“No,” Cora cut him off.

“What do you mean, ‘no’?” Cadman asked.

“We are at war. The Wraith represent a threat to our existence. On Earth, some of us were able to close ourselves off because it meant our survival. Here, the best way to survive, the only way to survive, is to remain open, whole, in touch with your full selves. Even if you shut down the Guardian, even if you destroyed it, it would not matter. There are enough of you, a critical mass. Your telepathic signatures, hormones, pheromones, are all saturated with stress. Everyone who comes here, the minds of all with the potential will open.”

“What if—what if we return home and, and just stay safe. Or we could have the Guardian turn us off again, and then leave,” Heightmeyer suggested.

“The Guardian cannot lock so many minds at once,” Cora said slowly, nodding as if she expected them to understand. “The presence of the others would simply reopen your minds. And if you return to Earth, you will awaken others like you.”

“I thought you said your people closed your minds there because it was safer. So couldn’t we do the same?” Stackhouse said, speaking for the first time since they had gathered.

“Not before the others awaken. Earth now faces larger threats than the human population’s hatred of Dragons,” Cora said sadly.

“How many of us are there, on Earth?” John asked, his voice soft.

“Far more than you would imagine. Many hid. To ensure our survival.”

“Look, I don’t care how hard it is. You’re talking to us? You help us figure out a way to make this right,” David demanded.

“David,” Lorne said softly.

“What?” David whirled to face his partner.

“Why are you so adamant? I thought you were okay—I thought you didn’t fear me—” Lorne started.

“I just want you to be safe. To have options,” David said, his voice barely more than a whisper.

“Now that I know, I couldn’t go back,” Lorne admitted, running a shaking hand through his hair. “Would you go back without me—”

“No, no. Of course not, no,” David answered.

John glanced over at Rodney and saw Rodney shake his head. John laughed. Even if he and Rodney weren’t what Lorne and Dr. Parrish were to each other, he understood. Rodney would never give up something so sci-fi cool. Or something that made his mind even more powerful.

“So, say we’re okay with staying… whole,” John hedged. “What do we do now?”

“Train. Learn. Understand,” was her reply.

~~~

_**Chapter 7:** _

_Tales of a “Dragon Moon” persist throughout the Southeastern United States despite the scope and severity of punishment that awaits any who talk or even allude to it. The phrase shows up in code in folksongs, limericks, even nursery rhymes. At first glance, it seems strange that people would risk their lives and livelihoods on something so frivolous, but a closer look at the legend may shed some light on this._

_The “Dragon Moon” is supposed to represent a time where the penniless and downtrodden who had reached the end of their rope, sent forth a prayer to the heavens, begging for assistance and requesting salvation. To the people’s surprise, their sworn enemies, the dragons, long believed to be destructive foes and pure enemies, showed up to the fight, filling the sky with their bodies, flying wingtip to wing tip. They were silhouetted against the moon and fought tooth and nail to save those who plead for help._

_Those who witnessed the event, or so the legend goes, were so in awe at seeing the dragons save them from their oppressors, that they created a holiday and named it in honor of the dragons._

_Horrifying as honoring dragons might seem, it is not that difficult to see the appeal. “The legend gives people a (false), but at times an overwhelming sense of security. It stands for the proposition that one’s mortal enemy may become one’s greatest friend and protector. If even a _dragon_ could change sides, then there is hope for each and every one of us. We need not continue as we have been, lying, cheating, hiding, and can proclaim our worth,” says one veteran researcher._

_A second researcher offers a slightly different opinion. “As sensational as the story may be, it is for that precise reason that it persists. People want to hear about the impossible. People want to exaggerate, they want to go out into the world and proclaim that anything is possible. If one’s enemy can become a friend, then anything you desire must be within the realm of possibility,” says Dr. Flank, a prominent psychologist, who specializes in draconic delusions. “It does not mean people who admire the legend actually think dragons are good or believe they themselves are dragons. This is purely a fantasy belief; a relic of people striving to form a more perfect vision of who they would like to be.”_

_Whatever the reason, it seems that the myth of the Dragon Moon will persist for years to come. But why does the legend persist? How are people coming up with these justifications despite the hefty penalties in place for support of dragon-kind?_

_“It’s exciting,” seems to be the most common answer. “None of my friends actually wants to be in trouble with the government, but we get the vicarious thrill of being subversive, of being a part of something bigger,” exclaimed another._

_Another reason seems to be the legend itself—so many codes and abbreviations persist, that they pop up in almost everything. From public records to fraternity pledges, people may find themselves reading about the Dragon Moon without even noticing it. The story is so ingrained into local culture that the ideas even have been communicated through lullabies and baby decorations. Students at a few small schools have even identified their mascot as a helpful dragon._

_—from “Subversive Mythology and Pop Culture, Part III,”_ Miami Herald _, August 16, 2008_

~~~

“Are you sure this is a good idea?” Dr. Simpson asked as the third jumper settled to the ground a half-dozen meters away, just beyond the high tide line. The sun was setting over the water behind it, casting the jumper in an orange-bronze glow. They were on the far side of the Mainland from Atlantis, far from the city and its sensors, on the edge of a sheltered bay ringed by cavernous cliffs, deciduous trees, and wildflowers. 

Evan turned to look at her, taking in the somewhat harried, fearful appearance that had come over almost every natural gene carrier on Atlantis in the last few weeks. “No,” he said with an uncertain shrug, “but it’s an equally bad idea to do nothing.”

“I heard that,” Col. Sheppard—John—said as he walked by. He shot Evan a devious grin. “This is a brilliant idea, isn’t it Rodney?”

McKay was walking by, typing away on his tablet one-handed, and every few steps consulting the LSD in his other hand. “What was that?” he asked, as he straightened up and looked around, looking positively disoriented.

“I was just saying this is a good idea,” John repeated, looking intently at Rodney. 

Evan could tell something about the intensity of John’s gaze, the way Rodney’s expression shifted suddenly, that they were communicating. It would take a long time to adjust, to get used to it, especially being open about it around others, but Evan had taken Cora’s words to heart. He truly believed they could stop the Wraith, and maybe if they could succeed here, they could succeed in the Milky Way as well. He’d heard the rumors about the Ori. He _understood_ the threat they were facing. 

The only way to get from here to there, was to train, like Cora had said.

“This is my idea,” Rodney replied. “I’m a genius, so of _course_ it’s a good idea.”

That earned a smile even from Dr. Simpson. “I have to admit, I am looking forward to it, _flying_ ,” she said with a smile, playfully nudging Evan’s shoulder. “Most of all, I heard Miko figured out how to shift without destroying all her clothes. If I can master that, I’ll be thrilled!”

Evan chuckled. He had to admit, Dr. Simpson had a point.

They had a long road ahead of them, he knew they did, and the risks were enormous. He still didn’t want to consider what would happen when they got called home—and he knew they would, eventually. But for now, he—and his Dragon—were content to _explore_.

That night, and one night a week each week thereafter, Dragons took to the skies of Atlantis, their scales glinting in the light of the setting sun, casting the bay in a kaleidoscope of color. John’s Dragon was the biggest, with a wingspan of about 20 feet. His scales were an inky blue-black, with a mottled pattern of silver scales on his right foreleg, on the part of his arm that was always hidden by his wristband. He talons were pure black, as was his tail, and the plating down the center of his back. Much to Evan’s surprise, Sheppard’s belly was a light sky blue, and John had a habit of wrapping his tail in such a way that he covered that patch of color, concealing it from view.

Miko Kusanagi’s Dragon was a brilliant carnelian red. She measured 15 feet wingtip to wingtip and 25 feet from snout to tail. Gold scales graced her shouldres around her shoulders and painted a trail down the center of her back. Miko’s armor plating was iridescent and seemed to blend and shift, disappearing into the surrounding environment, rendering her deceptively tough.

Dr. Beckett’s Dragon was nearly as big as John’s and had an equal wingspan. A tabby pattern of blue and gold scales gave him an almost regal look, an look enhanced by the gold armor down his back and tail. When he took to the skies the moonlight caught the lighter blue of his wings and seemed to dance . 

And then there was Evan. David had taken a picture of him, the first day they transformed outside, eager for Evan to see himself, behold himself with his painter’s eye. As a Dragon, Evan was grey with green and brown accents, making him excellent and a natural at camouflage. David noted Evan appeared well-attuned to nature, and particularly suited to be his mate. After all, David was a botanist.

When Evan saw himself, he thought his scales looked almost—painted—like something out of an impressionist painting. He wondered whether his appearance was set in stone before he met David, or if his Dragon form took shape based on the beauty he found there.

Once a week they took flight. And slowly they learned to fly, jump, hover, breath fire, attack with their tails and talons, and most of all, to communicate, with each other and their telepathic human companions on the ground below.

~~~

_**Chapter 8:** _  
_Never trust a dragon, for they are slipperier than liquid silk._

_— Proverb_

John had known, deep down, that the relative calm they had found once they had outed themselves to each other wasn’t going to last. Of course, part of him thought it would take longer before it slipped away entirely.

But of course things weren’t that easy. Two months after John’s first shift, John, Rodney, Evan, and Miko were summoned back to the SGC ostensibly to help the SGC’s scientists and military with some of the developments Atlantis had recently made in improving ZPM efficiency and utilizing Ancient technology, including Rodney’s early reports on the feasibility of building a ZPM production facility. 

They could all tell _someone _was suspicious, but who was suspicious, or of what, or for what reasons, no one knew.__

__They toyed with telling Elizabeth, but most of them were too afraid she would turn them in if she knew what they were. _Dragons_ , the enemy._ _

__So John, Rodney, Evan, and Miko agreed to go and mentally prepared themselves for the uncertainty of possible death._ _

__John could see the toll their impending departure was taking on Dr. Parrish—David—and perhaps more interestingly on Kate Heightmeyer, who had developed a connection with Miko—but there was little they could do. There was no humanly palatable reason they could think of for a botanist (or the lead mission psychologist) to need to tag along on a military and physics mission. Especially not when David and Evan’s relationship was a blatant violation of DADT._ _

__At the last minute, Elizabeth persuaded the SGC to take four others, two scientists, two military, who had all worked on the same projects, but who weren’t gene carriers. She insisted the others had to stay on Atlantis because of mission security. “Dr. McKay will be much better utilized continuing to work on the plans for a ZPM manufacturing facility here,” she added._ _

__The SGC seemed to accept her explanation, but the Dragons knew she was on to them, but they didn’t know what she knew, or what she would do._ _

__But first there were more pressing issues to deal with… like how Dragons seemed to be pairing off with human telepaths left and right. Every practice Rodney would look almost longingly at John, but still, John held himself away. He kept hoping Rodney would let it go._ _

__He really should have known better._ _

____

~~~

“So, are we going to talk about this?” Rodney asked, dropping down onto the corner of John’s bed.

“Talk about what?” John asked, feigning ignorance, but pausing in the middle of unlacing his boots. 

“Really, please?” Rodney scoffed. “Are we going to actually play it like that?”

John turned towards Rodney, staring blankly. 

“You, me,” Rodney began, pointing back and forth, “this thing going on between us.” He sighed and crossed his arms over his chest, drawing John’s attention to his too perky nipples, which were showing through the thin layers of his uniform in the chill early morning air. “Your mind is an open book to me, I can see it all right there, so don’t even try to deny it. I _know_ you know how I feel.” Rodney’s lips were extra pink like he’d been biting them in frustration.

“Then why do we have to talk about it?” John asked, dropping his eyes and turning away from Rodney to stare at the wall. He finished loosening the laces on his right boot and let it drop to the floor with a dull thud. Silently he repeated the motions on the left, and when that boot fell, he stayed frozen, staring straight ahead. If he focused hard enough he could block Rodney out of his peripheral vision. If he just—

“Well, maybe I need to talk about it,” Rodney replied at last, his voice small and a little sad. “We may have super-duper, Ancient enhanced telepathy now, but I grew up and lived my life as a human being, _Homo sapiens sapiens_ , and I may not like it very much, or be very good at it, but we do most of our communicating by talking, John. And for something this big, I’d rather not leave things to chance. There’s too much at stake. This is too important... _You’re_ too important.”

John shifted on the bed, running his hands through his hair and letting his elbows slide down to his knees. It was all right there for him to see. Everything Rodney felt, everything he didn’t know how (or normally wouldn’t try) to put into words. All John’s emotions, all his secrets, everything about his past and his life, all his fuckups and failings laid bare. Scraped raw. They were all right there for Rodney to see... Surely he could understand?

“John,” Rodney said softly, then more forcefully, “John,” his tone almost pleading. He put a hand on John’s shoulder and another on his back, just gentle, resting, trying to get his attention. 

But it was too much. “Don’t touch me!” John snapped, flinching and lashing out, shoving Rodney’s hands away from him. His heart was racing, and the second he stopped moving, it _hurt_ , somewhere soul-deep and instinctive, it wasn’t in John’s nature to cause harm for the sake of it... It wasn’t in his makeup to hurt Rodney. But he couldn’t take it back, and he couldn’t do what Rodney wanted, and he certainly couldn’t talk about it. So if that was what it took, shoving Rodney off, denying them something extra, it was worth it. After all the alternative was... The alternative was impossible.

Beside and behind him, Rodney made a hurt, frustrated noise and slapped his hands to his thighs. John could hear or feel or sense his muscles tense, and for a moment he thought it had worked. Rodney stood up and took two steps. 

But then Rodney paused, said something that sounded a lot like “fuck it,” and changed course. Next thing John knew, Rodney was sitting down beside him, so close he could feel Rodney’s radiating body heat and sense his breath where it gusted across John’s skin, but with just enough distance between them that they weren’t touching. Rodney wasn’t touching him anywhere. 

“I can’t give you what you want,” Rodney whispered near John’s ear, “because you don’t actually want that.” He huffed a sigh, the gust of air made the fine hairs on the back of John’s neck stand on end. “I don’t mean that in a presumptuous way, and I don’t mean to sound like a stalker.” He chuckled, a sharp bark of a laugh that seemed to explode in the air around them. “I’m not a very nice man, but I’m not like that.” 

Rodney paused again, and John knew he was shaking his head. John resisted the urge, the tug deep in his belly, to turn and face him. He could do this, he just needed to be strong—

“When you shoved me, it _hurt_ you. When you were asking me to leave, you tried to convince yourself you were just refusing benefits, that you’d be fine. You wouldn’t even let yourself acknowledge how _I’d_ feel. And all that while, I felt the panic in you, welling up, crushing you, making it hard to breathe. Right now, every nerve impulse in your body wants me to touch you, but you won’t let go long enough to close the distance between us. You are absolutely fucking terrified of what would happen if I walked out that door. And I am too,” Rodney admitted, his voice shaking.

The genuine, naked fear in Rodney’s voice was enough to snap the last shred of resolve John had been clinging to, and sent him reeling, turning immediately to look at Rodney.

There were tears in his eyes, damp, streaming down his cheeks, and his hands were shaking. But John had known it, or at least would have if he had allowed himself to touch that part of his mind. “Bah—” he started, unsure of what he was going to say, but Rodney held up a finger and gently pressed it to John’s mouth, silencing him. Rodney’s skin was warm. The contact between them burned like a brand, tingling. 

“John, when we are apart, I share your dreams. You wake up, worrying about me. Your pain keeps me from sleeping. I know how you feel, and how long you’ve felt it, because it’s all right here,” he clapped his fist over John’s chest, vaguely in the vicinity of his hear, “and in here,” he tapped John’s temple, smoothing a lock of hair away, “and in here,” he pressed a finger to his own temple. I know you were intrigued by me the moment we met. I know you’ve wanted to fuck me since we left the SGC, and I know you’ve been in love with me since the mission to M7G-677. I know my constant prattle about your Kirk-like ways hurt you. I know I remind you of a guy in college who you wanted, but could never figure out how to ask out. I know you think I don’t want you, can’t want you because you’re too damaged and broken inside, and even if you’re not, this is just the byproduct of a synthetic gene and a damn genetic booby trap left by the ancients.”

John blinked, shuddering. He had thought all that, it was true, but Rodney was touching subjects, touching places in his psyche John never allowed himself to venture. He was crying too, he knew. He could see Patrick Sheppard’s face scolding him, screaming at him to stop being such a pussy, man up, and accept reality. He had a place and a purpose and with those privileges came responsibilities that he just wasn’t able to throw away. 

“You’re wrong, John,” Rodney said with the kind of certainty he normally reserved for brilliant scientific discoveries, a smile ghosting across his face as he spoke as he reached out with both hands to pick up one of John’s hands from his lap, cradling it. 

It was his right hand, John realized, the one with the scar, and Rodney’s thumb was rubbing over it. Gentle, almost caressing. As if he wasn’t bothered by the failure and guilt it represented.

“You’re wrong, because I’ve been infatuated with you since you first sat down in the chair in the Ancient Outpost and showed me where we were in the universe. I fell in love with your mind, then.”

“So, what, you love my brain? I’m a fascinating subject to you?” John spat, knowing as he said it, it wasn’t true. It burned, stabbed like a knife to the chest, and he regretted speaking the moment the words left his lips. 

“You’re not going to scare me off,” Rodney said simply, lifting up John’s hand, and leaning in, just a little, so he could brush his clasped hands against John’s right cheek.

John leaned into the touch in spite of himself. 

“What’s so bad about loving you for your mind? It’s beautiful and talented, and far more intelligent than you would like people to believe. I mean, I’m Rodney McKay. I do not hand out compliments, and I can honestly say that you’re not stupid. Coming from me, that’s huge.” He pulled John’s hand back and rested it against his own chest. “But it’s also beside the point, because I love all of you, even your damned heroic martyr complex, and your stupid, cocky bravery. I love all of you. And I started loving you before I ever had the gene therapy and before you ever got switched on. This is _real_. And even if it wasn’t, love is all just biochemistry anyway, and that’s a very soft, squishy science that I don’t trust.”

The humor injected with Rodney’s blunt honesty made John laugh, the first happy noise he’d made since they entered the room. He felt the corners of his eyes crinkle with a smile for just a moment before his expression faltered and the dark ghost that lived within him swept across his mind.

Rodney’s fingers were pressing on the scar.

“I don’t... Rodney, I’ll only end up hurting you, and I can’t—I just can’t.” He started to pull away, but Rodney just held on tighter.

“You think you’re bad at relationships because of what happened with your ex-wife, what was her name?”

“Nancy,” John answered as Rodney mouthed the name, apparently finding it in John’s thoughts.

“But that’s not a fair comparison. You married her as a last ditch effort to keep your father happy. She knew you were gay, and your divorce was essentially inevitable. The top secret missions were just the excuse she used,” Rodney explained.

John nodded, swallowing hard. He’d known that. Obviously he’d known that, otherwise Rodney wouldn’t have known to tell him, but it was a truth he’d always had trouble accepting, a truth that was just too difficult to hear...

“And I know,” Rodney continued, his thumb pressing a little harder against the scar drawing John’s attention to what it symbolized. “I know you are afraid to forgive yourself for what happened to Nancy because if you do—”

John stiffened in anticipation, waiting for the words to land like a blow.

“—If you do,” Rodney repeated, unfazed, wrapping himself around John so that he had nowhere to go, nowhere to run, and it felt—safe—”then maybe you’ll have to forgive yourself for _Jake_.”

John flinched at the name, surprised despite himself, a tiny sob escaping. He’d been okay, it was water under the bridge, an immutable part of the past, something he lived with, something that indirectly formed the basis of his reputation. It had brought him attention for all the wrong reasons, and he had worn it like a badge of honor...

“Not much of a badge of honor if you cover up the only physical evidence,” Rodney whispered in his ear.

“It’s what I am,” John breathed, the words mostly inaudible.

“What’s what you are? If you mean a dedicated, selfless, loving person, who never gives up, and does everything he can to help, then I’d say you’re right,” Rodney murmured, speaking into John’s shoulder.

John tried to pull away. “No,” he protested. “I’m a monster. I let him die. I fucked up! I violated orders, and he died anyway. It was my _fault_!”

“How was it your fault? You tried to save him?”

“You don’t know. You don’t know anything!” John shouted. “Just because you see it in my head, you think you understand.” He was getting worked up. He could feel the nagging voice starting up in the back of his mind. Maybe if he pressed, Rodney would drop the issue and they could just... They could just... Well, fuck if John knew, but anything to stop what he was feeling. 

But then Rodney’s voice broke through the haze, calm and clear and as reassuring as he had ever been chastising. “No, I don’t know, and I don’t want to assume. That’s why I’m asking you to talk to me. Help me to understand why it’s your fault, why you’re trying to push me away.” He paused, as if waiting for John’s response.

John said nothing.

Apparently, Rodney took John’s silence for acquiescence. “You were in love with him.”

“Yes, no. I mean I don’t know. It was... I never let myself get that close to people. I didn’t want to get attached. I learned that the hard way, back in college. It was too difficult...”

“But you loved him.” It was a statement.

“Yes,” John admitted on a broken sigh. 

“And he meant a lot more than he was supposed to,” Rodney added.

John just nodded, swallowing hard around the lump that had sprung up in his throat. 

“I think you were in love,” Rodney concluded. “And his name was Jake?”

“J—acob Holland,” John stammered, heaving a huge sigh. The last time he’d said that name or heard it spoken aloud was at his court martial. 

“I’m getting know this has something to do with a court martial,” Rodney said with a hint of alarm in his voice, “but you’re going to have to help me out with the details.”

“He... With don’t ask, don’t tell, I have to be very, very careful about who I’m with. Usually, it’s not a problem. I pick up people off base and stay discreet. But with Jake. We hit it off right away. I never wanted anything more than flying, but then there was Jake. I got... careless.”

Rodney made a tsking protest.

“Maybe not careless,” John agreed, “but I wasn’t as careful. Jake was under my command, I was in charge of him. It was in violation of those regs too, and I should have paid closer attention.”

“Someone caught you?”

“Someone overheard the tail end of a conversation that painted Jake in a bad light. It didn’t directly implicate me. They... they tried to turn him in, to me. And when I refused to pursue it, someone went over my head.” John sniffed. “There wasn’t enough to drum him out, but we both knew they were watching. I, pulled back. I was trying to cover my own ass, and I wasn’t there for him. Jake started volunteering for missions, dangerous shit—”

Rodney made a little protesting noise. 

“ _More_ dangerous shit than what our orders normally covered. He tried to keep his head down. Not rock the boat, not do anything that would give anyone any grounds to challenge him.” John paused, collecting himself. He had never actually told the story, not his way, not just talking, instead of answering a set of carefully calculated questions whenever his JAG didn’t object. 

“Was it... Did he volunteer for something?” Rodney asked.

“No,” John shook his head. “That wasn’t how he died.” He let out a shaky breath, and Rodney pulled him back, wrapping his arms tighter around John’s chest. “Part of Jake keeping his head down meant he wasn’t questioning orders. Not that he normally questioned orders, but, you know, there are orders that are illegal that you have an obligation to not follow, and then sometimes there are orders that just smell... off. Sometimes the intel’s unreliable, sometimes someone made a mistake, sometimes there’s something they’re not telling you, and sometimes they can’t, but sometimes if you ask to confirm the orders or ask for clarification, things slot into place. There was just something off about his orders. For one thing they called for only half of the team. I wasn’t on it. Jake didn’t take his concerns to me. He went out on a rescue mission, got shot down. The rest of the team, my people, died, but Jake was still there. Still hanging on. I knew, I could feel him; I couldn’t explain how, but I could. But they wouldn’t send rescue. I volunteered to go with the other half of the team. They wouldn’t authorize it. I volunteered to go by myself, still nothing.”

“You couldn’t sit by and let him die.”

“No,” John agreed. “And I couldn’t just leave people behind.”

“So you took a helicopter and went anyway,” Rodney supplied.

John nodded. “Got shot down, but I was ok.”

“Is that when...” He rubbed his fingers over the scar, questioning.

“Not exactly,” came John’s reply. “I was injured, but not that badly. Jake was... Jake was a fucking mess. There was no way he should have been up and walking around, but he was, and I let it lull me into a false sense of security. There was nothing I could do for the others. I tried calling for evac, but never got a reply. They were closing in on our position, and we had to go. Jake walked until he couldn’t. All the while he was tearing up his insides, making the bleeding worse. I carried him when he couldn’t walk any more. I searched for help, evaded capture, did everything... but it wasn’t enough. He died. He died, and it was my fault because I fucked up and got him caught, I fucked up and didn’t support him, I fucked up, and didn’t have his back when he needed it, and then I fucked up the rescue, and he... and he... he...”

“He died.”

“Bled out in my arms,” John supplied. “We were finally rescued four hours later, and I couldn’t do anything about it. I disobeyed a direct order, and they court martialed me for it. I wanted them to crucify me, because no punishment would be bad enough for what I deserved. The only reason they didn’t throw me out on my ass was because I tried to rescue Jake and actually brought back his body.”

“There was something else,” Rodney observed. “They knew about the intel.”

“It was bogus, “ John explained. “I realized later, when I was sitting on ice at McMurdo that I had personally observed one of the locations and knew the condition, and it didn’t look like the satellite photos they gave Jake. But I couldn’t figure that out in time. I was too late.”

“And this?” Rodney asked, stroking the scar.

“I broke my wrist in the crash. Nondisplaced fracture, didn’t even notice. Only I cut my wrist after the crash, when I was trying to evade the Taliban and get us to cover. There was the skeleton of this old Soviet bird—I had taken it to us and was scavenging for parts, almost missed the Taliban’s approach. I was trying to lift Jake over the side, to use it as cover, when I slipped. Jake landed ok, but I caught my wrist on some twisted sheet metal and tore it open. I fell, and broke it more. Had to have surgery. The scar is the combination of those events.”

There was nothing more to tell, not really sure where to go, he stayed silent, staring ahead.

Rodney’s hesitant kiss on the back of his neck drew John from his reflection. “There is nothing, nothing at all you’ve said that makes me not want you or makes me think you’re unsafe or unworthy.”

“But I _let him die._ “

“No you didn’t, you fought for him. You were brave and honorable, and you brought him home.”

“But I abandoned him,” John protested. “And I got punished for it. I—didn’t volunteer with him; I didn’t fight the orders even though I could tell something was wrong. I let them send me away... I didn’t even learn what had happened until three hours after his crash, did you know that? Three _hours_. I could tell something was really wrong, but I convinced myself it wasn’t. I knew that intel was flawed. I remembered the smoke we’d seen on the last mission. It was coming from the Northeast, where Jake’s mission took him. We saw rocket fire. Jake should have known. I should have got there sooner!” John sobbed, his breath hitched, shaky and uneven, while tears streamed down his cheeks. 

“John,” Rodney said softly, then, again, even quieter, “John?”

John seemed to rise out of the misery of his fugue state. 

“You realize that’s the Dragon in you talking. It needs to save people; it refuses to stand by and allow others to come to harm. Its imperative is so strong, you can’t see the difference between things you can change and things that are out of your control.” Rodney paused.

John wasn’t sure if he was supposed to respond, but he nodded anyway. That much had been pretty clear to him; in fact, learning he was a Dragon, and learning what Dragons were really like, made a lot of oddities in his life firmly slot into place. 

“Ok, but let’s think about this for a minute. What could you have done differently?” Rodney prompted, rocking John in his arms.

“I could have refused my orders, insisted on going with Jake. I could have brought up the flawed intel. I could have protested illegal orders. I could have flown the mission for him. I—”

“All right,” Rodney said, interrupting with confidence and purpose. “I’m no expert on your country’s military, so correct me if I’m wrong but challenging orders is risky and doesn’t yield immediate results, right? There would be challenges and a court martial, and you wouldn’t have necessarily gotten to stop Jake’s mission, right?”

John nodded solemnly.

“And if you had just out-and-out violated orders that would have been bad. If Jake had survived, you wouldn’t have been free to take this job. The universe would have suffered.”

“If I hadn’t been locked, switched off, I could have shifted. My Dragon could have protected Jake, could have saved everyone,” John objected.

“John,” Rodney answered softly, “then you would have been hunted, persecuted, executed. You wouldn’t have been free or alive to come here, to meet me, to fight the Wraith! And that’s assuming Jake didn’t fear you or refuse to let you help him! People’s fear could have provoked you into defending yourself, what if you’d shifted and breathed fire? If you’d hurt someone or damaged property, they would have killed you. They wouldn’t have cared it was self-defense. The nature of our current reality makes that a particularly likely prospect. I wouldn’t sacrifice you to that, John, you are worth so much more.” Rodney punctuated his sentiments by pressing a kiss to John’s temple. His words were making John think. Think and consider in a way he hadn’t before. 

“So where do we go from here?” John asked.

“You have to forgive yourself,” Rodney said, poking John in the shoulder. “And you have to agree to let this happen between us.”

“This, what is this?” John asked, only half kidding.

Rodney sighed, “It’s a bond, a relationship. Something that happens between Dragons and us hybrids. Look at Evan and David, Carson and Laura, Miko and Kate—we gravitate towards each other. I can hear your thoughts more clearly and more easily than anyone else’s. When you’re in the air, I’m your anchor to the ground. But you keep resisting me, you’re holding back. Everyone else, they find love and—and comfort in each other, they connect and their communications are faster, stronger. But we—” Rodney blinked and looked away. “John, if something happens to you that I could have prevented if this distance you insist on gets one of us killed—”

“I just don’t want to lose you. I don’t want to be responsible for your death,” John blurted.

“You weren’t responsible for Jake, and you won’t be responsible for my death. Everything I do, I do willingly. You should know that. I am the most stubborn man in two galaxies,” Rodney added with a smile.

John inhaled, preparing himself to protest, but something in the back of his mind just wouldn’t let him. “Okay,” he said, with a sigh, his body going limp as it collapsed against Rodney. “Okay.”

Slowly, reverently, Rodney reached over and lifted John’s shirt, kissing the skin he exposed. Piece by piece, he undressed John, removing his own clothes as he went, and urging John backwards onto his bed.

John allowed himself to be led. He felt fragile, his skin too small, the air to close, Rodney’s hands impossibly too large, positioning John with his legs spread, just wide enough for Rodney to nestle inside. “Fuck me,” John breathed. Then looking Rodney in the eye, he said again, with more conviction, “Fuck me.” 

“I’m trying to,” Rodney chuckled back, pressing a kiss to the corner of John’s mouth. “I was going to ask you for supplies, but I just saw where you keep them,” he said, reaching over and opening John’s bedside table, and pulling out the lube and condoms he found inside. A little fumbling and a little lube on the sheets later, Rodney was sliding inside, splitting John apart, John’s legs rapped securely around his hips.

 _I’m sorry_ , John thought, _I’m sorry I didn’t let you in sooner._

 _No need to be sorry_ , Rodney replied. Aloud he said, “I’ve got you, I’ve got you.”

And for the first time since he was a little boy dreaming of Dragons, John began to think maybe he would be all right.

~~~

_**Chapter 9:** _

_I don’t care what anyone says, what lies they’ve fed you. It’s been true since the dawn of time and it’s true now. The only good dragon is a dead dragon. I tried to save the Universe from their menace, and for that I am being persecuted._

_—Sentencing statement of P.K., September 23, 2007_

~~~

In retrospect, John was glad Rodney had forced the issue when he did. If they’d waited any longer, John wasn’t entirely sure they would have made it. 

It wasn’t just _Elizabeth_ , who suspected the dragons. Someone else had figured out, too.

“Shit,” John swore, his voice low and quiet. He’d known this would happen, known it was only a matter of time. Now SGC would know. At best, he, Carson, Miko, Evan, and the others would be banned from returning to Earth, stripped of their rank and responsibility, and cast out of the city (with their IDCs invalidated and GDOs confiscated, of course so there could be no going back). If they were unlucky, well... Even if Kavanagh hadn’t connected the dots, someone at the SGC would. They’d round up natural gene carriers at home and probably those who’d successfully had the gene therapy as well. If Kavanagh had noticed anything unusual about Rodney, David, Peterson, Markham, or any of the others, rounding up the artificial gene carriers would be certain. The SGC might stop there out of respect for the servicemembers (even if they did turn out to be Dragons), but the IOA would be in the know, and they _wouldn’t_ stop. They would go after the families, routing out any source of contamination. His father, brother, all Carson’s siblings, Evan’s mom, even Rodney’s niece and sister would be caught up in the mess. It wouldn’t matter if they lacked the genes to become Dragons, or could never develop telepathy without the gene therapy, the association would mark them for life. Then would come the political fallout, with General O’Neill, the Director of Homeworld Security, turning out to be a Dragon... 

“John,” Rodney breathed beside him, pulling him from the dark spiral of introspection. _We have to do something!_ went unsaid, but came through loud and clear through the bond. 

“I said let me through!” Kavanagh shouted again, stepping closer to the gate. “Under chapter 44 section 237.5, paragraph B of the Atlantis Mission charter, I have a priority one message for the SGC and IOA on account of how the First and Second in command of the Atlantis military contingent, the Chief Medical Officer, and the Chief Science Officer—”

 _There goes any chance he doesn’t know about Rodney and the others_ , John thought bitterly.

“—Are all compromised and have allied themselves with known enemies of the IOA’s member nations.”

The gateroom guards twitched at the allegation, their P90s dipping lower. The Sergeant in charge looked around nervously, his gaze falling on John, disbelief and question in his eyes. 

Emboldened, Kavanagh took a step closer and turned his back to the guards, projecting his voice up to the control room above. 

John felt something twitch and panic within him. 

“Given the compromised state of leadership, the Atlantis mission charter states the chain of command must be bypassed and transmission to Earth authorized so an independent observer designated by the IOA can assess the situation.”

The guards’ weapons twitched again, but up in the Control Room, Chuck did nothing. His hands didn’t even inch towards the controls.

Beside John, Rodney flinched, an abortive movement that echoed the desperate clawing need to move, to do _something, anything_ rather than lie down and take it. It was against their natures to stand back and accept their fate. 

Meanwhile, Kavanagh would not be deterred. His face reddened, his long pony tail whipping around as he turned from the gate back to the guards and then to Chuck. “They have allied themselves with entities defined by section 690, paragraph 24 a through j of the first Geneva Convention as excluded from the rules of war and the strictures of civilized discourse.”

Absolute silence fell.

“Jesus!” someone in the control room muttered.

John’s heart leapt in his chest. His Dragon scrabbling, clawing to the surface demanding the chance to protect himself. It took every ounce of self-control he had to stay there, stay still, not shift... but even then he was pretty sure his eyes flashed blue.

One of the guards crossed himself. 

Another whispered, “What?” clearly not making the connection. 

A third guard mouthed, “Dragons.”

The second guard’s P90 snapped up, angled so he was covering both John and Rodney. 

Running feet sounded from somewhere behind them, and John registered the familiar brush of Teyla’s mind—probably accompanied by Ronon if the heavier footfalls were anything to go by. He could hear, no _feel_ , Evan and David approaching, but even with them they wouldn’t be enough, they wouldn’t get there in time. And even if they did...

Chuck’s hand twitched. 

What could they do? They would just prove Kavanagh’s point, or at least lend more credence to it. 

Chuck depressed the first symbol.

“Sergeant, no!” Rodney, commanded, freeing himself from the paralysis that seemed to have descended over the room.

“On the ground. On the ground now! Drop your weapons and put your hands on your heads,” the Sergeant was shouting.

Chuck’s hands were flying over the controls, three chevrons locked, four, five…

John’s spine twitched, itched. He was sweating with the effort of _not_ changing. 

“Stop dialing!” Rodney shouted. 

The other guards in the room had joined in the chorus of orders to disarm and drop to the ground.

 

John couldn’t move. Every instinct in his body screamed for him to act, but if he acted, he would be condemning them all; they would suffer the same fate, perhaps a worse fate, than if he did nothing.”

The seventh chevron was locked, and the eighth was on its way.

Kavanagh was facing the gate, ignoring the commotion behind him.

“Raise the gate shield!”

Everyone froze, even Kavanagh.

Elizabeth’s voice echoed around the gate room.

As the gate connected, Chuck slammed his hand down on the shield controls, and the forcefield sprung to life.

John and Rodney exchanged nervous glances.

“Atlantis mission control, this is Stargate Command do you read?” General Landry’s Voice boomed through the comm system.

“Stargate Command, this is Atlantis, is that you General Landry?” Elizabeth asked, sounding far too calm.

“Dr. Wier. When the gate connected ,we received an encrypted databurst claiming to be—”

“General Landry,” Elizabeth interrupted. “I’m sorry to cut you off, but under no circumstances should you open that databurst. We very recently discovered a Wraith collaborator in our midst. That databurst was an attempt at sabotage by the collaborator. It was booby-trapped into the gate dialing protocols to send the moment we established a wormhole with Earth. It is very likely harmful to your systems. Under chapter 44 section 237.5, paragraphs, B, C, and J of the Atlantis Mission charter, this is a Priority One message, and I am requesting a neutral arbiter to from Earth to come to Atlantis to determine the extent of our security breach. If possible, I request that Maj. Gen. Jack O’Neill. Please sequester that databurst. It could cause serious and irrevocable harm to your systems. Atlantis will dial in again in 12 hours at 0400 Atlantis Standard. At that time, I will have a secure databurst prepared for General O’Neill’s eyes only.”

“Understood, Dr. Weir,” General Landry replied. “I am sorry to hear about your saboteur.” 

“Me too, General Landry, Atlantis Out.” Elizabeth signaled to Chuck to close the wormhole. 

Kavanagh, who to this point seemed too shocked to speak, opened his mouth to protest, only to find every gun in the room turned on him instead.

“A _Wraith_ collaborator?” the Sergeant said with disdain.

“Gentlemen,” please escort Dr. Kavanagh to the brig, and please make sure he receives no visitors until, our arbiter arrives. 

The guards nodded, and obeyed, scooping a screaming, protesting Kavanagh off his feet and dragging him from the room by his elbows.

“Hmph,” Elizabeth snorted, before tapping her headset. “Major Lorne, please report to my office at once.” She turned to John and Rodney, “Colonel Sheppard, Dr. McKay, join me please?”

John followed Rodney after Elizabeth up the stairs and into her office exchanging nervous glances.

~~~

“She knows,” Evan observed as the door closed behind him.

“We think she does,” John corrected.

“How long have you known?” Rodney demanded, ignoring John.

Elizabeth gave Rodney a quizzical glance, before her features smoothed into something more serious. “I have _suspected_ the true nature of Ancients since I began studying them.”

Rodney grunted.

“I only had confirmation a few months ago, when I saw Dr. Beckett shift on his balcony,” she admitted. “What I don’t understand is why didn’t you come to me?”

“I’m sorry, Elizabeth, but your warm, fuzzy feelings for Ancients aside, there are still very real laws on Earth that will get us all killed, the second someone at the SGC gets wind of this!” John protested. 

“John,” she responded in kind, “Peter Kavangh figured out, you were just going to stand there and do nothing while he returned to Earth to damn—”

“If John had shifted he just would have guaranteed us all being dead, rather than making it really pretty sure,” Rodney said bitterly.”What do you think would have happened if a Dragon had popped up in the gate room? Did you think people would welcome it with open arms?” he scoffed. “And with all due respect, I’m not sure we can trust you. After all, you just condemned General O’Neill to wind up like us. Doomed.”

Elizabeth glanced at each one of them in turn. “Gentlemen, I recognize that I have no idea what it is like to live with the secrets you have. But I also recognize that anyone other than another… _Dragon_ ,” she whispered, “is unlikely to be sympathetic to your situation. Therefore, Gen. O’Neill the only logical choice for our arbiter. But I am not selling him out. _You_ ,” she pointed at John, “are going to prepare the databurst. You are going to give him the information he needs, and he will make an _informed_ decision. You have 12 hours. I suggest you get to work!”

“It’s our best shot,” Rodney murmured as they left. 

“Yeah,” John agreed, solemnly. 

Which was why John found himself spilling his guts to General O’Neill in a recorded message later that afternoon. Once the message was sent, it was only a matter of time. O’Neill would come and he would be in the same boat as the rest of them, or he would stay away and send someone else. It would be out of John’s hands.

As the databurst transmitted, John wondered if he had made the right choice, was there anything he could have done that would have led to a better result? He had listened to Rodney. He knew this sort of situation was not his fault, but his Dragon keened and moaned with frustration. 

Sometimes all one’s options, were bad ones. And sometimes the only option was to wait.

~~~

_**Chapter 10:** _

_I’ve had a lot of wakeup calls in my career, but none has ever been as stark or harsh as when I realized that we were sworn to fight and protect against a People that would have been our strongest ally because another enemy manipulated us into doing so._

_—Interview with Lt. Gen. Jonathan J. O’Neill, December 21, 2011_

~~~

Just because every Dragon and human telepath on Atlantis was on tenterhooks waiting for news of General O’Neill’s arrival didn’t mean Cora or the other Ancients let them off the hook. If anything the Ancients stepped up their game, pressing for more training, more practice, more _learning._

Elizabeth seemed to be operating under similar parameters. She sent Dragon-led teams on more missions than ever before, and pressed Rodney relentlessly to complete his ZPM plans. 

John almost believed she was trying to get as much out of them as she could before they all got whisked away, but he could tell it was more than that. Her motivations were different. She _did_ expect more from them as the seconds ticked by, but not because she wanted to get her money’s worth or something similar, but because she wanted all of them, and Atlantis, in the best possible position when the arbiter arrived. Elizabeth was trying to give them a fighting chance.

Of course, it was inevitable that the Dragons would have further encounters with the Wraith. And this time, AR-1 wasn’t so lucky. 

They were supposed to be visiting Sidara to broker a trade agreement: medical services for kava beans and a promice from the Sidaran not to ally themselves with the Genii. Of course, as luck would have it, they happened to show up 20 minutes before a culling started. 

John, Rodney, Ronon, and Teyla were leading a group of Sidaran refugees to a system of caves halfway between the Sidaran capital city and the gate. John ordered Ronon and Teyla to take the refugees inside, while he stood guard and kept watch for stragglers. Of course, Rodney stayed with him. They were beckoning on a group of young children—terrified six or seven year-olds running as fast as their legs could carry them, when John saw them—

A Wraith hunting party approaching on foot from behind. If he didn’t do something, the children would never make it. 

Without a second thought, he twisted and transformed, between one heartbeat and the next he lept into the air and soared overhead. He opened his mouth to shout at the children to watch out, but only a screech came out.

The children looked up at John, expressions spreading in awe as he flew overhead, inky blue-black scales glistening against the green treetops. _Run! Run!_ he encouraged them. But they could not hear.

Suddenly Rodney popped out of the cave entrance and into the Wraith’s line of sight. “Come on kids, hurry, hurry, faster. You can do it.”

“Dragon! Wraithslayer! There’s a Wraithslayer, do you see it? Flying? It’s beautiful!” murmured one little girl.

“Yes, yes, beautiful Dragon, hurry—Wraith are behind you!” Rodney shouted, the panic in his voice escalating.

The children understood this, and somehow forced themselves to run even faster. John didn’t know how, but somehow they all made it. Only then Rodney was exposed. The Wraith were approaching _Rodney_. Rodney was firing. He’d emptied two P90 mags, his 9mm, and a backup mag into the lead Wraith, but still it advanced. Rodney was fumbling with his tac vest, trying to find more ammunition, but it would be too late. The Wraith’s hand was already outstretched.

There was no choice. John folded in his wings, dropped like a rock, twisted, and landed on his feet in front of Rodney… in front of the Wraith.

Its feeding hand was outstretched, inches from John’s chest, and before he could change again, or find a weapon, the Wraith’s feeding hand made contact. John felt one second of eternal abject terror, and then it felt like his chest was being torn apart. He’d been wounded—shot, stabbed, stunned, electrocuted, fed on by an Iratus bug, but nothing, even the Iratus bug, had come close to the agony John was feeling now. His lungs froze, he heart stuttered, and it felt like every synapse in his body was on fire. 

The Wraith let go just as suddenly as it had latched on, staring at its hand and gasping in agonized death throes, but John hardly noticed. For John, the damage was already done. He was crumbling to the ground, naked, lungs spasming, eyes unseeing. Unable to shift. He wanted so badly to just breathe fire, to burn the Wraith from the face of the planet, but he could. Not. Shift.

Above him, Rodney had grabbed John’s weapons from where they’d dropped when he shifted, and he was firing, screaming like a madman, and it worked. The Wraith fell, one… two… three… until suddenly they were alone, and it was still. Just John and Rodney alone in the woods at the mouth of the cave the children had disappeared into moments before.

“John?” Rodney asked, dropping to his feet. “Oh god… it tried to feed on you. I remember this. Cora said it paralyzes and you can’t shift. John?” 

But John couldn’t really hear. Spots were forming in front of his eyes, and Rodney sounded like he was talking from the other side of a well.

“Shit, shit, shit!” Rodney cursed. “You’re not breathing. Why are you not breathing? Oh allergies. Some Ancients were allergic and—” he sighed. “Oh John, why the hell do you have to go and do everything the hard way?” He turned and looked over his shoulder and screamed. “Ronon? Teyla? I we need a medical team stat. As soon as that gate shuts down, we need dial Atlantis. And bring me the med kit! Sheppard’s wounded.”

John blinked, slow, hazy.

“Stay with me. Come on, stay with me,” Rodney pleaded.

But John couldn’t comply. The last thing he saw, as he drifted into blackness, was the mask of an Ambu-bag descending over his nose and mouth.

~~~

When consciousness returned to John, he awoke to find himself in the infirmary. It was the pre-dawn hours, the sun just a rosy suggestion on the horizon. Rodney was snoring with his head on John’s hospital bed, fingers intertwined with John’s.

Carson stepped out of his office, and John tried to ask what had happened, but all that came out, was a breathy rasp and a squeak.

Carson startled, nearly dropping the chart he was consulting, and rushed to John’s side. “Don’t try to talk. Here ya’ go, lad,” he said, easing an ice chip into John’s mouth. “You’ve only been off the vent for three hours. Your throat’s bound to be a mite scratchy.”

On fire, was more accurate, but John could excuse the understatement. “H—how long? What—” he tried, only to break off into a coughing fit that felt like someone was shoving knives through his ribs.

“The culling was two days ago. According to Cora your allergy is on the severe end of the scale. Most of us just experience pain, lose the ability to shift for a time, and have some impairment of motor control.” Carson shook his head. “When the Wraith tried to feed on you, it overloaded your pain receptors and completely suppressed your autonomic nervous system. It’s a miracle Rodney was able to keep you alive. If the gate hadn’t shut off when it did, we wouldn’t have stood a chance. We broke three of your ribs performing CPR. According to the readings, the allergic reaction has stopped—it’s biphasic, for future reference, you can ask Rodney all about that if you are not sure—and you should be able to shift again. However, you still have tremors in several major muscle groups, and your ability to heal hasn’t quite returned to normal. You’re still healing faster than a human, but not as fast as you _should_.” Carson seemed to realize he was rambling, because he broke off, patted John’s knee ( _ow_ ), and added, “Just rest up, and in no time you’ll be right as rain.”

It wasn’t until that evening, when Carson had concluded John was stable enough to be released and Rodney was slowly, carefully, walking them back to John’s quarters, that one of the big puzzle pieces in the Ancients’ strategy against the Wraith tumbled into clarity in John’s mind.

“I think I get why the Ancients were so adamant about needing human telepaths,” he said to Rodney.

“Now you understand the problem we faced,” Cora said, shimmering out of nothingness to stand before them, semi-transparent, giving off a spectral air.

Rodney jumped. 

Beside him, John flinched, the tremors that had too recently stopped starting up again, so it felt like John was vibrating against Rodney’s side.

“Jesus Christ,” Rodney exclaimed with a yelp. “Do you have to do that? He’s injured,” he gestured at John. “Why don’t you go spy on and scare the crap out of someone who’s not expending all his energy healing?”

“Rodney,” Cora replied, spreading her arms wide and using the tone a kindergarten teacher might use with a particularly obstinate and petulant child. “You know we do not try to frighten you. If you only paid better attention, you would know when we are near, when we are coming.”

“Make yourselves sound like some damn religious figures why don’t you,” Rodney mumbled under his breath, earning a quiet chuckle from John beside him. 

The tremors were easing again. Now that John felt more stable beside him, Rodney resumed the task in which he’d been engaged when Cora had so rudely interrupted them and guided John into his quarters and seated him on the end of the bed. 

Cora followed them, of course, at least this time she had the decency to use the door like a normal person.

“I was kind of occupied,” Rodney said, letting out a huff of frustration. He wanted to sit down next to John, but pride and his own stubborn ire with Cora for existing and _playing_ with them kept him on his feet.

“I am sorry,” Cora replied, sounding genuinely chagrined. “I suppose I don’t understand, and that is something about which we must spend a good deal of effort, learning, adapting.”

Rodney was content to go on ignoring her, maybe putter around the room (or stalk, like the big, grouchy, teddy bear Miko had compared him to), but John squeezed his hand. The insistance in that gesture brought him up short, so he turned and sat down, sliding into place next to John and wrapping one arm around his shoulders. He was still steadfastly looking at the floor, but John nudged him, and Rodney couldn’t deny John what he wanted, so he looked up and resolved to play nice, and was utterly astonished by what he saw. 

Cora looked solid, human—or at least Ancient or Alteran or Lantean or whatever she would have been when she was alive. She wasn’t transparent, and she definitely wasn’t glowing. Most of all, she looked sad, contrite, and Rodney found himself paying attention despite his reservations.

“I am so sorry about what happened to John on Sidara. And I am genuinely sorry for what you must have gone through, Rodney. You are right to point out that I really do not understand. We had—there was nothing and no one like you in my time. That was the problem. And while I am thrilled and excited that you and your kind exist now, that for the first time in more than 10,000 years we have a chance at beating the Wraith, I forget myself. I was wrong to assume, wrong to chide, and wrong to sneak up on you like that. I know nothing of the bond you share, least not of sharing in the higher planes while being rooted in the physical world.”

Rodney cocked his head sideways and looked at John in disbelief.

John nudged his shoulder back. “She’s saying ‘sorry,’ Rodney. Try not to look so shocked.”

“But...” Rodney spluttered. 

“What did you mean when you said we understand your problem?” John asked, sounding much stronger.

“Communication,” Cora said matter-of-factly, sitting her decidedly opaque ass down in the only other chair in the room, John’s desk chair. “When we are shifted, we can communicate with each other, but not with others, not with humans. In battles against the Wraith we could not coordinate, strategize, or express our needs. If one of us got hurt, there was no way to call for help. If we sensed or found the enemy in a far-off distance there was no easy way to tell our allies, those we were sworn to protect, of our discovery. At first it was a hindrance, but as the war dragged on and our numbers dwindled, it became a larger problem, until our advantage was turned into the catalyst for our defeat. We began to seek out Ascension in larger numbers in hopes that we could affect change, but humans cannot hear us unless we manifest, and in this form, we are too much of a distraction. Those we tried to aid saw us as deities, they began to worship us. This we could not abide. It hindered the effort and... Our people have never been comfortable with such misplaced faith, such abhorrent disregard for science and the pursuit of knowledge, such elevation of one form above another.”

“Couldn’t you have just helped in your ascended form? Not just talk to people, but wipe the Wraith from the face of the galaxy or something. At least give people a boost? They’ve spent the last 10,000 years being raised and slaughtered like herds of cattle. Entire planets, cultures have been wiped out when they’ve dared to stand up and fight back. The ones that are left standing are superstitious and paranoid and twisted. They’re terrified of science and knowledge and any kind of change. Some of them worship the Wraith and others worship you, they think you’re some kind of spectacular, benevolent, all-powerful ancestors who actually give a shit about them and their suffering. And you’ve just sat up there in your ascended plane looking down and doing nothing, couldn’t lift a finger to save their lives, even when millions, billions of people were dying all around you. And all this time you were just waiting to figure out how to talk to them?” Rodney ranted, turning red in the face as he got genuinely worked up with righteous indignation. This wasn’t the kind of yelling he did routinely for his minion and the flunkies the SGC and IOA continued to insist on foisting on him. No, this was Rodney McKay, pissed off.

“Bullshit,” John murmured beside him. 

“You’re telling me you couldn’t lift a finger while in your spectral, ascended form?” Rodney said.

“We’ve—there was a time when my people in this form intervened to shape the events of the physical plane,” Cora looked down and away, avoidant, and if Rodney didn’t think it was impossible for a spectral, ascended being to produce tears, he would have sworn she was crying. “You have heard the saying power corrupts...”

“And absolute power corrupts absolutely,” John finished as Rodney nodded in agreement.

“In the distant past we discovered just how true that was. We almost destroyed... everything. To this day, there exists a galaxy burning, consumed by the catastrophe our direct involvement wrought. That discovery was why we... We’ve always believe that influenced or evolution, channeled our powers into shifting. We became Dragons because we must.” Cora’s voice was firm and solemn, tinged with regret. She clasped her hands together in her lap, presenting such a strange picture of vulnerability that Rodney was momentarily taken aback. 

“Okay,” Rodney said at last, “you’re talking about the Ori. We’ve heard of them.”

Cora nodded, “And perhaps one day, when the Wraith no longer threaten the Universe, you will be able to turn your gifts to correcting the mistakes we made and the mess we left behind, when we were still quite young as a species.”

“But I still don’t understand why you need _us_ ,” Rodney said, pointing at himself.

“Because humans can’t understand Dragons or Ascended beings,” John supplied. “I was trying to tell the kids to run, that there were Wraith closing on them, and they needed to get out of the way, but they couldn’t hear me. By the time I shifted to human form, it would have been too late, and then the Wraith tried to feed on me, and look what happened.”

“But I can hear you,” Rodney pointed at John and Cora, “and I can talk to them. Act as a translator?”

“Yet when it comes to feeding and our other susceptibilities, you behave as a human,” Cora added. 

“What other susceptibilities?” John asked, narrowing his eyes.

“They developed a gas that renders our minds dormant. It is deeper than typical unconsciousness or sleep, but yet not a coma. When hit with the gas, we… switch off. We fall wherever we are, and do not awaken for some time,” Cora said. “It affects us in both human and Dragon form.”

“So even if some of you don’t shift, they can still stop you from communicating,” Rodney surmised.

“And it removes the risk of feeding,” John realized. “The Wraith know who the Ancients are, even if they look human, and there’s no risk of death by midafternoon snack.”

“Precisely,” Cora agreed.

“I want you to show me everything, and I mean _everything_ , you have about this gas. We’re going to learn how to avoid it, how to beat it, and then we’re going to make the Wraith sorry for ever thinking of using it!” Rodney resolved.

“That would please me greatly, Rodney,” Cora replied.

~~~

Almost a week had passed since Elizabeth Weir’s request for an arbiter came through, and the IOA was growing increasingly restless waiting for Jack to make up his mind. Being in Colorado Springs wasn’t helping. Jack most sincerely wished he had returned to Washington for his soul searching, because Hank Landry was up to ten requests _per day_ , and yesterday, he’d started siccing _Walter_ on Jack. He’d only had one visit from that weasel Woolsey, so that was one plus. 

Besides, SG-1 was here. _Daniel_ was here. And Jack understood now that he couldn’t make any kind of rational, educated decision about what he was going to do without Daniel by his side.

~~~

“You’re thinking about going,” Daniel declared into the dim orange light of an early Colorado Springs morning. 

Daniel’s voice jerked Jack from his contemplation. 

They were lying in Jack’s bed in his all-but-abandoned house, once again inhabited thanks to Jack’s prolonged stay. Jack was spooned up behind Daniel, both naked, Jack’s morning wood brushing promisingly against Daniel’s ass and gently slipping between his cheeks toward to his still-wet hole. 

Daniel arched his back and lifted one leg, giving Jack better leverage. He scrabbled in the covers for the lube, found it sticking out from under his pillow, and passed it back to Jack. Two squirts and a perfunctory stretching later, Jack was sliding home, filling Daniel up, splitting him apart. Daniel hadn’t really put words to the feeling before, but he felt _safe_ like this. No matter how laid bare he might feel during sex, no matter how exposed, when Jack was inside him he knew it was _safe_.

They made love in silence, Jack slowly rocking his hips as Daniel arched back to meet him. 

“I have to go,” Jack said at last.

“You don’t _have_ to, Jack. We could stay here. There’s no indication the switching effect would carry over here. If we limit the amount of contact natural gene carriers on Earth have with any natural gene carriers returning from Atlantis, the effect probably won’t be enough to unlock anyone’s primary telepathic pathways. The staff can be safe. You can be safe. You don’t need to worry.” 

“It’s a dereliction of duty both as a general, and as a Dragon, to not go,” Jack replied, pressing a kiss to the back of Daniel’s neck. 

There was no hitch in Jack’s voice when he said “Dragon,” and Daniel felt a rush of guilt and embarrassment for suggesting Jack, what, hide? Submit to Goa’uld-influenced bigotry? Take the easy way out, abandon their people in another Galaxy… It was a shameful suggestion. “I’m sorry,” Daniel whispered, but Jack shushed him.

“I need to help,” Jack said, resolved. “The best way I can help is to turn myself on…”

Daniel couldn’t suppress a bark of laughter over Jack’s choice of words. 

“Hush,” he whispered into Daniel’s ear, wrapping his right arm around Daniel’s waist and pulling their bodies together. He thrust into Daniel at an unforgiving pace, forcing Daniel to focus on him, every movement. The slide of skin on skin silencing every competing thought and worry in Daniel’s busy mind.

Daniel gave into the siren song of motion. He felt himself relax, forgetting his worries little by little until he was panting, struggling for breath between moans, and Jack was hitting his prostate with every thrust. Unable to hold off any longer, Daniel came all over his chest and the bed, his cock untouched. 

Jack climaxed at the same time, buried to the hilt. He didn’t pull out, but instead thrust in farther, holding himself there. They lay together in silence, as their breathing slowed and quieted, the jackrabbit pace of their pulse gradually backed off to a more sedate, languorous rhythm. 

As the minutes ticked by, Daniel could feel Jack slowly begin to harden again.

“Daniel, right now, I can make lights turn on, and I can fly a pretty cool spaceship with my mind. That’s all well and good, but compared to what I could do if I go to Atlantis—if _we_ go to Atlantis? I would have real ability to defend us, to defend you and Sam and Teal’c and everyone else in this command and on Earth and every other planet we care about. I can’t in good conscience forgo that opportunity.”

“You’ll be hunted if they ever find out.” It’s an empty threat. Jack never shied away of being hunted. Jack couldn’t turn his back on the others in his command, those like him, who by a trick of genetics and the fortune of a little alien ancestry would be condemned without regard for the quality of their character or their service to their country and planet.

“I’ll be in good company. We’ll _all_ be hunted if they ever find out,” Jack answered, his voice haunted.

“We?” Daniel asked.

“You had the gene therapy three months ago, right before you were supposed to take the _Daedalus_ to Atlantis.”

“You looked that up,” Daniel mumbled, still uncertain where Jack was going. Things had been kind of hectic then and a little strained because of the physical distance between them. Jack was in DC, Daniel was supposed to be heading off to Atlantis on a long-term basis. There was a lot of adjustment and they hadn’t really figured out how the long distance thing was going to work. Since then, everything had been chaos and terror—pretty much par for the course at the SGC, but with Daniel back on SG-1 and Jack still at Homeworld Command, the issue had never come up.

“No, I didn’t,” Jack countered, “and if things were a little different, you would _know_ I didn’t look that up. Daniel,” he said, voice deadly serious. “I can _feel_ it in you, sense it. The therapy was successful. I think my mind is seeking yours out, trying to bond with you, just like the others on Atlantis. It _hurts_ me that we can’t make that connection complete.”

Daniel squeezed Jack’s fingers, and breathed, a wave of understanding and fear coursing through him. _Of course!_ It made so much sense, but could he? Could they? What was he thinking. He would take Jack anyway he could get him. To be closer to him? To have that intimacy on another level? How could Daniel possibly say no, especially not if doing so would better enable them to protect Earth? “Then we’ll go.” He kissed Jack’s knuckles and arched his back. “Together, and we’ll figure out a way to make this _right_.”

“I love you,” Jack whispered, rocking his hips a little faster.

“But we’re taking the _Daedelus_ , not using the ZPM Atlantis found to gate back,” Daniel added hastily. “We’re going to need that time to do some research.”

“What kind of research?” Jack asked quizzically. 

“The kind that’s forbidden pretty much everywhere on Earth,” Daniel replied. 

“Dragons,” Jack breathed. “We’re going to learn everything there is to know about Dragons.”

“Yes we are,” Daniel sighed.

~~~

_**Chapter 11:** _

_You have to understand, when we set out in search of Atlantis, we did not set out to free the galaxy from the Wraith or restore justice to Dragonkind. We didn’t know about the Wraith, and no one, save Elizabeth [Weir, Ph.D.] had a clue about the connection between those we call the Ancients and Dragons._

_But when we got to Pegasus, we didn’t really have any choice. The legacy of the war between the Wraith and the Dragons—Wraithslayers—shaped the existence of the entire galaxy. And if we didn’t act, we risked having that war spill over into our own galaxy at a time we could ill afford it._

_We did what we had to do. That’s all any veteran of the Stargate Program can say. And in our case, it just happened to involve destroying Wraith and reviving Dragons._

_—Testimony of M. Rodney McKay, Ph.D, Ph.D., before the Third United Nations Commission on the Rights of the Dragon, February 27, 2014_

Consciousness came back to John slowly. He was acutely aware of the grating, burning sensation that wracked his chest with every breath. _Broken ribs. Punctured lung_ , his mind supplied oh-so-helpfully. His back ached, and his head throbbed. He tried shifting and discovered his right shoulder was swollen and stiff. It felt like he’d tried to… shift? And been stuck? His legs… didn’t want to move right, but at least he could move them. He could feel broken bone grating in his right calf, though. He’d fallen. He’d tried to shift and he’d been hit with—a stunner and fallen? But fallen onto what? Or what had fallen onto him? He wasn’t sure.

He did remember the mission. He and Rodney had gone to PYZ-… P3Z, PYX? Great he couldn’t remember the designation of the world. Not a good sign. At least he remembered the local name. Didn’t he? Torielle… he thought that was right. It had been just him and Rodney. It was their fourth mission to the world. They’d been following up on a legend about the Ancestors. Each trip back they got a little more information out of the weary and skittish old woman who served as storyteller to the planet’s largest city’s council of elders. She’d talk, but only for just so long, dolling out tales in tiny doses, leaving them wanting more even as they struggled to digest the information, tease out fact from fiction. 

John had taken the full team the first three times, but it was so uneventful they decided to split up this time around, giving Teyla and Ronon a break from the tedium. After all, everything had checked out. There had been no Wraith sightings in the area. No Genii activity. No Wraith worshipers. And the main city, what was it called? Toria Prime? Had a system of shielded evacuation tunnels that led to bunkers—nice nuclear-power-free bunkers that provided shelter from cullings. There was an entrance to the evacuation tunnels in the Tavern where they met with the storyteller. So what had happened?

“The storyteller was a lying, cheating bitch, who sold us out to the Wraith in exchange for, you know, I’m not sure what the hell she sold us out,” Rodney mumbled from somewhere beside John.

“Rodney?” he asked, pausing to cough up blood. He was healing, he knew he was, could feel it, but it was happening more slowly than usual.

“The Wraith surrounded the tavern. One of them called us out. The people fled into the tunnels. Madame storyteller pulled a knife on me to keep you in line, and then the Wraith came in the front door. You started to shift… we both missed the Wraith that came in the back door. They stunned you; you fell; and then in the, uh, ensuing struggle, either the Wraith or I shot out a brace for one of the support beams, and the ceiling came down on our heads. I uh, hit my head, got stunned, and woke up here,” Rodney grinned sheepishly at John. 

It would have been reassuring if John couldn’t feel Rodney’s terror coming through their bond. It took him a moment to understand why, Rodney was terrified.

“They saw me start to shift.”

“They knew what you were anyway,” Rodney answered with a jaded sigh. “Like I said, Antara sold us out.”

Right, that was the storyteller’s name. 

“All shifting did was hurt you and, confirm what they already knew,” Rodney said, glancing away. There were tears in his eyes, and Rodney was giving off a guilty, tormented vibe that didn’t quite make sense.

“What is it? What’s wrong?” John asked, shifting as much as he could and scooting on his butt towards Rodney. “I mean beyond the obvious.”

“I messed up, John. I’m supposed to be your partner, a—a bridge between you and ‘normal’ humans. I should look out for you, use my Ancient gifts to protect you, and I didn’t see the threat. I agreed to let Ronon and Teyla stay on Atlantis. Even when General O’Neill seemed worried about the two of us going off alone, I insisted, because I—I wanted time for the both of us, and I dismissed the Torians as harmless. I fucked up.”

“No you didn’t.”

“I—”

“No, Rodney, if anything, this is my fault. I’m the team leader, the CO. I had the same thoughts you did—hell, even General O’Neill didn’t push the issue,” John protested, pulling himself up to a sitting position. He was going to say more, but at that moment the door swished open, and in walked quite possibly the most pompous Wraith John had ever seen. 

Rodney immediately flung himself in front of John, covering him, protecting him from the Wraith that entered. 

The lead Wraith, a Soldier, stood close to 7 feet tall with ridiculously broad shoulders that seemed to stretch at the seams of his iridescent, black coat, the light glinting off it like the shell of a beetle. His face was tattooed, but if John wasn’t mistaken, the tattoo was actually an ancient character. He loomed over John and Rodney with a self-satisfied air. “Ancestor. Ancient. Lantean. _Dragon_ ,” he sneered, “on behalf of my queen, it is my pleasure to welcome you and your pet human to my hive.” He stepped through the doorway and spread his hands. He was immediately flanked by Wraith drones. They moved into the room and spread out. 

John followed the Wraith as best he could, his head spinning a little with the movement. They were in some kind of small room, not a cell, but more a… utility closet? Or small office? Neither made sense for a Wraith hive, but it was some sort of small room with a door and a computer console. Why would they leave prisoners in such a space?

“Ah, you are wondering about your surroundings. You see, we have been monitoring you, waiting for you to wake. We have no intention of holding you here,” the Wraith said, spreading his hands to encompass the room around him.

Tim… John was definitely going to call him Tim. Since the Wraith was the _opposite_ of tiny. Who cared if the Wraith didn’t get the joke, it made John feel better.

“Of course,” the Wraith, Tim, continued, “I assumed you would wake some time ago. Rumors were your physiology would allow you to heal. I suppose we overestimated your… resilience. As it was, your human woke up moments _before_ you.”

John glanced over at Rodney, unsettled by the way the lead Wraith kept referring to Rodney like he was… 

Rodney’s eyes flashed wide, and John felt the answer form in his mind. _They don’t know_ , Rodney explained in his thoughts.

The Wraith knew John was a Dragon, but they didn’t realize there was anything special about Rodney… even after they’d had Rodney and John unconscious in their custody for hours.

“You know what I am, and yet you brought me onboard your hive?” John hedged, speaking carefully, breathing coming more easily with each passing moment. “If you were smart, you’d realize my people have returned to this galaxy. The others will look for me. They will find you, and they will not rest until you are destroyed.” He paused, catching the lead Wraith’s eye. “Of course, that’s assuming I don’t destroy you first.” John lurched, and around him Wraith stunners snapped up. “You want to bet they’re fast enough that I won’t burn you first?”

John wasn’t sure quite what to expect, but the Wraith bursting out laughing wasn’t it.

At last, the laughter stopped. “Your insolence is expected, but your words are hollow,” the lead Wraith, John was still calling him Tim, boomed, towering over John where he lay sprawled on the floor. 

“Oh, yeah?” John rasped, trying to project confidence, but failing as his words came out in a wet rasp, “Why’s that? You no longer afraid of what our bite can do to you?” 

John was expecting the backhanded slap to the face that followed. _Good_ , he thought. Maybe mouthing off would keep them distracted, or at least pontificating, and buy them time to do... something. 

He wasn’t expecting the Wraith to take a second swing at him. The punch landed on his already-injured ribs and sent what little breath he had fleeing from his lungs in an involuntary “oof.” He heard more than felt the sickening crack of bone followed by the sensation of something _giving_ inside his chest. He couldn’t breathe. He couldn’t breathe, there were black spots in his vision, and that all paled compared to the rush of thick, slick blood that filled his throat. 

Tim raised his hand for another swing, but suddenly Rodney was there, throwing himself on John and screaming for the Wraith to stop. 

Rodney must have torn himself free of the Wraith who were restraining him. John just hoped he hadn’t injured himself in the process, because at least one of them needed to be able to think, fight back, function, and John was certainly not in any state to do anything of the sort. Until his breath returned, he couldn’t even taunt (and really, breathing could happen any time now). Even with Ancient healing, it would take time to recover. 

“Stop it! Stop it! If you touch one hair on his head, I swear I will kill you all!” Rodney screamed, defiant. 

A booming laugh echoed from above, and through the spots in his vision, John could just make out Tim’s hulking shape as he stepped back, shaking with laughter. 

“Pardon me, human, but your toothless threats do not frighten me in the least. What can you possibly do to destroy us? You are food. We have your ship, your weapons, and your tools. You have no friends here.”

“John—” Rodney started only to flinch back, still protecting John, as the Wraith bend over and loomed. 

“Your precious _Wraithslayer_ does not frighten us either. His threats are hollow. In the long years since his people fled the stars, we have waited, and we have expected. We are ready for you, Dragon,” the Wraith spat, his fetid, slimy breath gusting over John’s face as the Wraith leaned closer still. “You will not harm us.”

The Wraith stood, abruptly and called out a word in Wraith that didn’t translate... It didn’t translate through the gate, but the meaning of it resonated telepathically. Whatever it was, whatever it meant, it sent an icy spike of fear into John’s chest.

Managing breath at last, John looked up at Rodney, tears in his eyes and said “I love y—”

But the world went black and he fell into unconsciousness like a switch had flipped before he could finish the words. The last thing he knew was another untranslated command followed by a puff of something _wrong_ , and he knew no more.

~~~

He should have been watching the other Wraith. 

“No!” Rodney screamed, his right hand thrown out, his voice cracking, hollow around the word that came too late, was answered with a bitter laugh. 

John was already gone, collapsed, eyes closed, unmoving, unseeing, his mind a cold void through their bond—there but not. Not dead. Rodney could feel that, just like he could feel the uneven stutter-step of John’s heartbeat beneath his fingertips, skittering like a scared kitten might run from a giant dog.

But there was no giant dog, and John’s physical body was still. Unnaturally so. And it was all to blame on the Wraith... Not Tim, their leader, but the drone standing behind his right shoulder, holding some sort of cannon with a long slender tube—

But _how_? Rodney was certain no projectile had been fired, nothing had hit John, but surely it had—

He looked up and met Tim’s eyes.

They were glowing with victory and contempt.

—And the pieces clicked. “You reconstructed the old formula, improved the, the mechanism of delivery.” The words were bitter on his lips. 

“Oh, we never forgot, and we never, not even for a moment, believed his kind were truly gone. They may have thought to lull us into complacency and stupidity with their absence, but Wraith—Wraith are unending.” He paused and bent at the waist leaning down, hovering over Rodney. “This time, our victory will be complete.”

The Wraith smiled, his grin so ferocious Rodney flinched, jerking back as if struck. Then, just as quickly as he had invaded Rodney’s space, he was moved back, straightening up and commanding the other Wraith with the wave of a hand. “Take this filth off the hive. His Dragon scum shall sully our Queen’s domain no longer. Throw him out the nearest airlock!” he commanded. 

“No, John, John! Noooo!” Rodney screamed, clinging to John’s motionless form. Even with adrenaline and desperation fueling his strength, he was no match for the Wraith drones who swarmed around them. He managed to shove one—the same Wraith who had shot John—back, tearing the Wraith’s hand from John’s arm, but the moment of victory did not last long. The drone back handed Rodney, while another stepped in from behind him and wrapped a slimy arm around Rodney’s chest, pulling him back, crushing him so it hurt to breathe. 

“John, no, John! Wake up, goddamnit!” He shouted as two more Wraith grabbed John by the arms and began to drag him from the room. Another surge of determination and desperation let Rodney break free from the Wraith’s stranglehold, pushing so hard against the arm restraining him that he flung the Wraith it was attached to into the wall. ping, Rodney scrambled to get his feet under him. His feet slipped against the foggy biomechanical flooring, but he pressed on, managing to reach the doorway as the Wraith dragging John disappeared around the corner about 10 meters down the hall. “Let him go! John!” Rodney cried again, reaching out with his mind, but finding only numbness on John’s end of the connection. Rodney took another step, determined to follow, but a Wraith stepped in front of him. Rodney bounced off the drone’s immovable bulk and landed awkwardly on his ass. 

“He cannot hear you and he will not wake,” the Tim the Wraith hissed in his ear. 

Rodney winced, unable to suppress a small cry of pain, when Tim’s taloned fingers closed around Rodney’s right bicep and hauled him to his feet. “I’ve read the reports. That gas doesn’t kill,” he panted, refusing to look at Tim. 

The giant Drone stepped closer, looming in Rodney’s personal space.

“You are correct, it does not kill, but there is no way your precious Dragon will wake before he meets with the explosive powers of hard vacuum,” Tim taunted in Rodney’s ear.

Relief mixed with terror, grief, and numb disbelief, and Rodney found himself letting out a shaking sigh. 

The Drone reached up and placed his feeding hand squarely in Rodney’s chest. 

“Go on, go ahead, eat me. Feed off me, you slimy bastard,” Rodney taunted. At last he looked at Tim. “If you kill John, you might as well go ahead and kill me too.” He shook in the Wraith’s grasp, struggling with his shoulders to break free. “I swear to you, if you let me live, I will hunt down and kill every last Wraith in your hive and every other hive in this pathetic excuse of a galaxy. I swear it. I will not sleep. I will not rest, until every Wraith is dead and with you everyone and everything who has given you aid. I don’t care if I have to tear a hole in the fabric of space-time, I will destroy you and see those you subjugate free. When I’m finished with you, the Pegasus Galaxy will be a sanctuary for Dragons and all who call them friends.” He strained and glared, and at that moment, Rodney didn’t care if he died. He couldn’t feel John. He couldn’t feel anything through their bond. There was no loss, no sense of finality, but there was also nothing to tell him John still lived. There was one hope—but no, he couldn’t let himself believe, not yet. And after all they’d been through, Rodney knew he didn’t want to go back to the way things were before. Now that he’d had John in his life and lived in the world the Ancients had opened up for him, there was no going back. If the Wraith could truly defeat them this easily, then there was no way they would win. All the Ancients’ plans were for naught.

Then again, if he did live... well. The Wraith were on notice. They’d been warned. 

Tension crackled in the air. The electrical, ozone-filled tang clashing with the slimy, rotten stench of decay that permeated every Wraith-controlled space. 

Rodney bared his teeth. 

The Drone reacted and pressed his feeding hand to Rodney’s chest. He felt the bite of its teeth tearing into his chest, an edge of something like a rush of power—this was it. Would he feel what Aiden had felt that day when he had fallen into the ocean? A mad rush of power?

But then Tim was laughing, cackling with mirth. “Wait. Don’t feed from him.”

The Drone made a kind of grunting noise that echoed the disbelief in Rodney’s mind. 

_Seriously?_

But the promise of something swift and terrible entering his body stopped just as soon as it had started. 

Rodney felt betrayed. For a moment he had invited death or the power the Wraith enzyme could bring. 

“Do not feed from him. Not yet. That order stands for all Wraith.”

The Drones were too respectful to say it out loud—or maybe they didn’t actually speak? Rodney wasn’t entirely sure about that—but he could feel them wondering “why not” with as much intensity as did he himself. 

“This man is allied with the Wraithslayers. There is no telling what they might have done to him, what protections they might have bestowed. This man holds much information, and he is but a tiny morsel. While the taste of his defiance would be sweet, it could be a poisoned treat. It is not worth the risk.” Tim stepped back out of Rodney’s personal space and glanced at two of the other Drones who had swarmed around the room in response to Rodney’s attempted flight. “Take him away. Place him in our strongest holding cell and ensure he is bound and shackled. There he will remain until the queen calls for him.” 

The Wraith grabbed Rodney by the arms again and hauled him off his feet so his toes just barely brushed the floor. They were learning, he’d give them that. He had no leverage to struggle, and their talons gripped his arms so tightly, he could feel his skin tearing under the onslaught. 

“Are you sure that will be enough to subdue him?” Rodney heard someone ask. “He has proven to be very resourceful.”

“I doubt he will be much of a threat if he is unconscious,” Tim said.

Rodney didn’t have long to wonder what that meant. Just as soon as Tim spoke, the telltale whine of a Wraith stunner whistled through the corridor, sending a blinding flash of tingling numbness racing through Rodney’s body. It was almost anticlimactic when darkness took him, almost. Right before he slipped under, he felt a stirring of concern from the other end of the bond... John—in Dragon form.

~~~

“Are you sure we shouldn’t have waited for General O’Neill?” David asked for at least the fifth time, shifting uncomfortably in the cramped quarters of the Puddle jumper cockpit. In addition to Evan and him, Cadman, Simpson, Teyla, Ronon, Stackhouse, Markham, Dr. Cole, and Dr. Zelenka were crammed in the confined space with them. David was in the copilot’s seat. Beside him Evan sat, piloting the ‘Jumper, his grip on the controls so tight David feared they might snap. He knew theoretically Evan—or he, or any number of people onboard could fly without any manual controls, but that wasn’t a theory he particularly wanted to put to the test, especially not under these circumstances. 

Of course, Evan knew that too, which was why his death grip was all the more worrisome. Evan didn’t respond, and when David looked over, Evan was sweating, his eyes focused on some unseen distant point. 

Well, it _was_ hot in here. Ronon and Teyla were in the second row of seats with the rest of their hastily assembled crew crammed in the back, the door between the two compartments slid shut to create the illusion of privacy or space or... something—David wasn’t really sure. Whatever the intent, the closed door just made the cockpit feel closer, tighter, more cramped. He knew intellectually that the life support was functioning and even their crew of ten wasn’t nearly enough to max out the life support’s capacity, not by half, but David couldn’t help feeling like there wasn’t enough air. It wasn’t just the people onboard but all their gear and the weight of their anxiety. Seven of the ten onboard were telepathic to varying degrees and their emotions were almost a tangible presence.

Evan’s condition sure wasn’t helping. Ever since Cora had shown up in their bedroom and announced the emergency, Evan had been on edge. Since they’d boarded the ‘Jumper, he’d been withdrawn, in such close touch with the ascended plain that David could barely touch his mind through the bind. Now, Evan was so close to shifting he was essentially nonverbal. David could feel it, the strain as Evan tried to hold on, not give in. David was pouring as much as he dared into the bond, trying to act as a tether, keeping Evan in touch with the here and now. But he could only do so much, one of them had to remain aware enough to be in contact with the outside world... Especially while they were piloting a ‘Jumper on an intercept course for a Wraith hive. 

“Evan?” he tried again. 

“Not enough time,” Evan grit out between clenched teeth. 

David glanced sideways and met his eyes. They were radiant, glowing green and reptilian. David gulped. “Okay.” The General was sure to be a powerful and formidable Dragon once he fully came into his heritage, but he had just achieved his first shift that morning, and had yet to learn any degree of control.

Evan turned back to the viewport and HUD, staring off into the distance. 

David was pretty sure Evan was watching the Hive as they inched closer. David couldn’t make it out yet, but Evan, as a Dragon, almost definitely could. Resigned, David sighed. He just wished he understood what was going on. 

“I am sure it will be all right,” Teyla said softly, ignoring David’s jump in response. 

For a moment, he had forgotten they weren’t alone. “I don’t know,” he said, the leaden weight of despair sinking in his gut again. When Cora had appeared, she had been so frantic, she’d showed up in Dragon form. They’d never encountered any of the ascended Ancients shifted forms outside of flight practice. Her thoughts were jumbled and (unsurprisingly) Dragon-like, and while David was a telepath, it was much harder to correctly interpret a Dragon’s thoughts when the Dragon wasn’t your bonded. He knew it had something to do with John and Rodney being in grave and mortal danger, a Wraith hive, anti-Dragon weaponry, and the fate of the galaxy. He knew time was of the essence. What he wasn’t so clear on, were the details. 

“I have faith,” Teyla said, her voice even softer. 

He knew that as a telepath in her own right, Teyla probably had as good a sense of what was going on as he did. David was going to say something else when the door to the aft compartment slid open, and Dr. Zelenka slipped in. 

Zelenka took one look at Evan, then looked nervously back and forth between Teyla, Evan, and Ronon. “Is he supposed—”

“Lorne’s talking to the Ancestors, ‘n trying not to shift,” Ronon answered succinctly. “And the doc’s trying to keep him grounded. What’s up?”

“I, ah,” Zelenka stuttered. “It is very crowded back there.”

Teyla smiled indulgently. 

“Dr. Cole and I are not used to the, ah, intensity. The other ‘Jumper, have we heard from them?” Zelenka pushed his glasses up his nose.

“The other jumper is fine, Radek. We will be there soon. Major Lorne can already see the Hive we are approaching,” Teyla reassured. 

“Carson hates to fly,” he answered in a seeming non sequitur.

“I believe Miko is flying,” Teyla answered, “although Carson seems much more comfortable flying a ‘Jumper since he learned of his heritage.”

“You mean Carson knows how to fly, so he’s less afraid of flying,” Ronon clarified. 

“Yes,” Teyla agreed.

David looked out of the corner of his eye through the edge of the viewport and tried to make out the distortion caused by the other ‘Jumper’s cloak. He knew he couldn’t actually _see_ it, but he could still tell where it was, sensing the buzz of mental energy its occupants gave off. 

“They’re fine,” David murmured, cracking a smile for the first time in hours. “Miko figured out how to get ten percent more speed out of our sublight engines, but she won’t go faster until she knows we’ll keep up.” His voice grew distant as he focused on pushing the information at Evan. He was met with irritation that quickly calmed into gratitude as Evan realized David was providing a way to get there faster. 

“Is there anything you need—” Dr. Zelenka began, but as he spoke the air around them became charged and the HUD and other controls glowed blue as a white light danced across the inner surface of the jumper. There was a whine and a shout from the back accompanied by what sounded like sparks. The hum rose in pitch and increased in volume, and then they were all thrown back into their seats—Dr. Zelenka left clutching at the door for support—as the ship surged forward. After a few tense moments in which David assumed they were pulling multiple Gs, the interval dampeners kicked back in and the ride smoothed out. The tiny speck in the distance grew bigger, now more of a faint blob. “We will be there within the hour.”

“‘S about time,” Ronon grumbled.

That was the other thing. Even with pinpoint guidance provided by their ascended allies, they were already ten hours into this rescue mission. The hive had long since left PYX-M33 and its gate had been blocked anyway until the hive had jumped to hyperspace. The hive had stopped for a hyperspace pause outside another system at a distance that would normally be a 24 hours by jumper from the closest gate. Even if the _Daedalus_ had been in there instead of already on its way back to the Milky Way... They wouldn’t have been able to help. Not where Dragons were involved. 

They’d managed to progressively shave hours off the trip so they were now going to traverse the distance in less than half the time, but David—and everyone with him—was left waiting, wondering if they could possibly be fast enough. 

“Is—is there anything else I can do?” Dr. Zelenka asked, climbing to his feet and once again shoving his glasses up the bridge of his nose. “We still need a way onto the hive, no?”

One more obstacle, and no one had done anything to address it yet. They’d brought enough firepower, of both the Dragon and firearms varieties to level a small city... Then again blasting their way onto the hive would very likely end in disaster for John and Rodney. “We need a way onto their ship. A stealthy way,” he added. “Teyla, do you think you can find out the code to open the dart bay doors?”

Teyla nodded, swallowing hard. 

“Dr. Zelenka, think you can make it look like a glitch?”

~~~

_**Chapter 12:** _

_As a survival mechanism, once the Ancient populace had dwindled and intermarried to the point where survival was unlikely, they began to bind themselves into one form out of necessity. It was an old trick they had occasionally used on young children on Atlantis (and before that on Earth and before that on Altera) to keep them from transforming until they were old enough to learn control and avoid accidentally hurting themselves or others). Out of desperation and hope for survival, more and more surviving Ancients bound their children to human form. The binding process involved forcibly closing the primary pathways of their telepathy leaving only the absolute minimum functions required to activate basic Ancient technology functioning. As a result, while Ancients persisted in the population, and continued to intermarry with humans, fewer and fewer Dragons were identified. But the gamble worked. Although Ancients could no longer shift form, their progeny lived, carrying within them the potential to become shifters again._

_By the late 20th Century, all the Ancients and Ancient-human hybrids on Earth were locked in human form. Most did not know they were indeed Ancients nor did they know that Ancients were Dragons._

_In some isolated cases, family traditions had passed down knowledge of Dragons, but these cases were rare._

_A now-famous case is that of Shannon Sheppard, nee Flaherty. Ms. Sheppard was one of the last essentially full-blooded Ancients left on Earth who both _knew_ she was an Ancient _and_ knew Ancients were Dragons. Although she bound her children’s telepathy, her son John was always instinctively in touch with his Ancient heritage and Dragon nature. These instincts manifested in a love of and skill at, flying and an intense self-sacrificing streak borne out of an instinctive need to protect those around him. Although Ms. Sheppard took the secret of her heritage to her grave, luck—or perhaps fate, or genetic instinct—would have it that her son discovered his heritage and brought about a revolution in Dragon rights in the Milky Way galaxy. _

_—from_ The Anthropology and Archaeology of Dragons _by Daniel Jackson, Ph.D._

~~~

“Ow,” Rodney yelped under his breath for the third time in the last ten minutes, shaking out his fingers where they’d been shocked. He was rushing and it was dangerous. He could slip up and kill himself or alert the Wraith to his activities. Cursing under his breath he returned to teasing out the door control filament.

It stank. Everything about the hive smelled dead and wrong and rotting, the texture of the walls was both too warm and too cold, and of course too slimy, and the fog that seemed to hover everywhere like the ship’s congested breath made it hard to see and harder to breathe. Of course since his telepathic abilities had awakened and he’d become attuned to Dragon senses and perception, everything Wraith seemed that much worse. His stomach threatened to rebel with every movement, and only a little of that was due to the concussion he undoubtedly had or the multiple stunner blasts he’d sustained in the last few hours. 

At least he wasn’t in a cocoon. Rodney gave an involuntary shudder at the thought. He’d had enough exposure to the things before his perception got Dragon-tinted and ramped up, thank you very much. He’d almost been surprised to wake up at all. And sure enough, his ankles had been bound and his hand had been chained behind his back. The cell was bare and isolated. He’d stayed still, just listening, reaching out through the bond, and pushing his senses further, further, until he finally convinced himself there was no one around. The lack of guards unnerved him, but that was offset by the relief that the bond was still there... 

He couldn’t feel John at the other end, _per se_ , but there was a flame, flicker, a spark of something there, and it gave him hope. 

Hope that was dwindling with every second it took him to get out of this cell. 

The first hour after he’d confirmed there were no guards around, he’d spent wriggling his hand out of the chains. With the help of slick, slippery blood from his chafed-raw wrists and a painfully dislocated thumb— _owww_ —he had finally gotten free of the cuffs. The leathery bindings around his ankles had gone faster once he’d realized they’d left him his dog tags and managed to fold back the rubber noise dampener from one edge. 

Now he was working on the door controls, which was slimy and disgusting, and probably wouldn’t get him very far... The absence of guards had to mean he was being held somewhere deep within the hive with layer after layer of impenetrable security and surveillance between him and any means of escape. But he had to try. While there was still a chance to save John, he had to do everything he could. 

Of course, that chance grew slimmer with every passing moment, and he didn’t know how long it had been since they had hauled John away. The stunner blast and head injury had left him disoriented and the Wraith had taken even his watch, so he had no way to gauge the passage of time.

Rodney’s fingers slipped on the leathery slime of the conduit, and he grunted as his knuckles bashed against one of the bony support ribs. What he wouldn’t give for John’s claws or Ronon’s knives, or Teyla’s ability to be calm and Zen about absolutely everything. He’d spent the last hour tearing into the wall with his fingernails, with only his dog tags and shoelaces as tools trying to MacGyver a solution to short the door open. Bristling at his own comparison—MacGyver was so very scientifically ridiculous—Rodney forced down the bile and pushed away the pain, and wiggled the exposed metal edge of his dog tag between the two wires.

The connection arced and sparked, the shock of it throwing Rodney backwards, his superheated dog tag, burning his chest, another mark next to the sluggishly bleeding cuts left by the Drone’s aborted feeding attempt. But in the end Rodney was still breathing, and when the smoke cleared the door was open. 

Cautiously, he made his way outside. He was in a long corridor with junctions branching out every few feet around sealed doors that must lead to more cells like the one he’d been in creating a sort of honeycomb pattern. The floor was foggier here than usual for a Hive, at least compared to what he’d seen, and the light was dim and purple blue, a diffuse glow that seemed to come from nowhere and everywhere. He looked up and realized he couldn’t see the ceiling above him, yet his cell had a ceiling, smooth and featureless and only 2.5, maybe 3 meters up. Everywhere he looked, everywhere he turned, there was more of the same. There was not a Wraith in sight, nor was there a control panel or console anywhere to be seen. Just more and more of the same in every direction he looked as far as he could see. He’d never seen anything like this on a hive before.

And suddenly he understood. There were no guards because there was no hope of him finding his way out. He was trapped. A rat hopelessly lost in a maze without even an LSD to help him make his way out. 

_Breathe._

That wasn’t true. Even without John, he wasn’t alone. For the first time, he reached out and up in the vague direction he thought led to the Ascended plain and asked for help. 

The response was immediate and nearly sent Rodney to his knees. As it was he slammed a shoulder into the nearest wall. “One at a time, damnit! I am not an Ancient party line.” He had no idea if they could hear what he said, since he rather stupidly said it out loud. But they must have, because the chaotic pressure in Rodney’s mind settled and smoothed into a single “voice” that didn’t quite use words, but painted a very clear direction for Rodney to follow. 

“Thank you,” he murmured in a rare moment of humility, and set off as quickly as he dared. 

Rodney followed the Ancient’s urgent prodding for what felt like hours, passing cell after cell, corridor after corridor until finally he reached a closed door that after some disgusting and slimy, but quick, prodding and only the smallest of shocks, gave way letting Rodney out of the maze and into the hive ship proper. 

This was more familiar. Rodney passed rows of empty cocoons and a few full ones, their inhabitants however, appeared to have already been fed upon and were either dead or close to it. Realizing reluctantly there was nothing he could do for them, Rodney crept on, slower now that there were Wraith around. 

He dodged three patrols of drones and snuck behind the backs of a half dozen Soldiers busy at work on their consoles. He found a lift and went up three levels, and dodged more of the same, doing his best to blend into the foggy shadows, his skin cast in the creepy yellow-green light that seemed to fill this level. 

At one point he found a deserted console and pulled up ship schematics. He noted with relief, his escape had not yet been detected, and sure enough the Ancients were leading him in the general direction of the dart bay. Of course the Wraith had stored Rodney about as far away from there as one could get and still be on the hive, so his progress was slow going, and took far longer than he would like. His Ascended friends didn’t like him stopping and poking around, either, and their insistent prodding grew and grew until it felt like his head might explode. “Stop it,” he hissed, fully aware, this time, he was talking to empty air. 

The noise and pressure in his mind abruptly stopped, and for a moment, Rodney was filled with a mix of relief and fear that maybe they wouldn’t help him anymore. Now that Rodney was in the more familiar parts of the hive he could make it without them, but there was a much better chance he would get caught.

A sole, hesitant “voice” sent him a mental query, and Rodney let out a breath he hadn’t realized he was holding. 

“Just need to check a few more things.” 

The voice scolded and prodded. 

“Look, if you want to do this yourself, be my guest, but as long as you’re planning to get help from non-Ascended Ancients and modified humans you’re going to have to make some allowances,” he whispered louder than was strictly necessary. “Now if you want to save John—”

The pressure in his mind rose to a crescendo before easing off again. 

“—there are a few things I need to know.” He turned back to the console and pulled up the hyperdrive status. “Like that, see, if I hadn’t checked the hive would have jumped to hyperspace before I could get off.” His hands flew over the controls as he spoke, grateful the Ancient upgrade had enhanced his ability to read Wraith, because this would have taken way too long otherwise. When the Ancients figured out what he was trying to do, they sent him some more suggestions, and within a few minutes, he had succeeded in creating a series of cascade failures and random-appearing power surges that would have the hyperdrive offline for at least a few more hours and probably a bit longer while the Wraith tried to tease out the source of the malfunctions. He noted they also appeared to be having some trouble with the Dart Bay doors, and hoped that didn’t cause him any trouble when he got there. Of course, those malfunctions would make his malfunctions less suspicious and the whole thing would—hopefully—keep the Wraith occupied and stop them from checking on him for a while longer. Anyway, he could always blast his way out of the Dart Bay if he needed too. 

Finally, he made one last check, an external sensor sweep, searching, searching, searching until _there_ , finally he found an unidentified piece of debris of the right bulk to be John. It wasn’t giving off any life signs that the Hive could detect, but the sensation at the other end of their connection hadn’t changed, so he pushed the doubt to the back of his mind and forged onward. 

The Ancients were prodding him again, and this time it was with a clear urgency that signaled approaching Wraith. Rodney hastily covered his tracks and set off in the direction of the Dart Bay. 

About a half hour later, and one deck and two corridors from the most accessible entrance to the Dart Bay, the pressure in Rodney’s mind increased again. Since he had reached out to them, the Ancients had stayed with him, a constant presence even when they weren’t actively directing him. If he had more time to think about it, he would probably analyze whether he had somehow given them permanent access to his mind and fundamentally changed how his mind interacted with the Ascended plain. There was a good chance it depended on a lot of squishy science, much closer to Carson’s brand of roulette-tinged voodoo than the rigors of astrophysics, so Rodney was almost glad he didn’t have the brain power to spare. However this new chatter was, well, new and different from what he’d sensed from the Ancients up until this point—a hyperactive cacophony of fear, excitement, anxiety, and frantic action that was making him dizzy. Worse, he could feel something else, something familiar, but almost like interference, like two analog radio signals overlapping. Only it was _in his brain_ , which as the smartest brain in two galaxies was really a tragedy. 

“Stop, please, tell me what’s going on?” he whispered, as he leaned against the nearest wall for support. The wall was clammy and reeked of rotten fish and something distinctly insectoid, and made his stomach roll and roil again.

He was still waiting for a clear response when he heard movement up ahead and the interference grew stronger. Great. Had the Wraith figured out a way to jam telepathic communications? Or maybe their own—no, that made no sense. Rodney could actually communicate with Teyla with some extra effort, so Wraith telepathy didn’t work that way. It didn’t really matter because whatever it was up ahead was coming his way, and he was still completely unarmed and worse, he was in a long stretch of corridor with absolutely no doors, consoles, alcoves, or other cover. He wished he could at least sprout claws or spit fire, or that he’d thought to tackle and disarm one of the Wraith he’d snuck by earlier. But it was no use. He crept ahead to the corner, pressed himself against the wall and crouched down, waiting to spring at anyone who rounded the corner. Maybe he’d get lucky and use the element of surprise to grab a stunner. 

The footsteps got closer and closer. There had to be at least ten people. Although, that was odd, they seemed to be moving quietly, which was a bit odd for Wraith Drones patrolling their own ship. There was something about the rhythm of the footfalls too, the gait, that didn’t seem quite right. Still he couldn’t take any chances. He got ready to pounce. The first boot came into view and he jumped, throwing himself against what felt like a lot of dry, un-slimy bodies. 

As he jumped the interference in his head cleared, and he was left with the clear elation and relief of the Ascended and something that felt a like David Parish’s thoughts. 

Rodney hesitated, but he was already falling, knocking someone to the ground with him, and they landed with an unpleasant oof, in the thick, floor-level fog. At least he landed on someone and not the other way around. The fog had his stomach threatening to rebel again. 

Shaking and shaken, he scrambled to get to his feet again, acutely aware of the sound of weapons clearing holsters on all sides. He looked down at the figure he had landed on, and—

“Rodney?” Radek Zelenka asked hesitantly, grunting an oof as Rodney rolled off him. “What happened to you? You are covered in blood and Wraith ship.”

Stunned Rodney couldn’t find the words to respond. He fell against the wall and used it to pull himself halfway to his feet. The interference mad sense though. It wasn’t so much interference as telepathic information coming from two different planes. He hadn’t been expecting it, so he hadn’t been able to parse it out. Now that he understood the sensation, he doubted he’d have that problem again. 

“You—” he said with dawning realization, shaking a finger in Radek’s general direction. “The Dart Bay door malfunction was you.”

“And you caused the cascade failures in the hyperdrive,” Radek replied, holding out a hand so Rodney could pull him to his feet. 

They both seemed to regret that the second it happened as Rodney wobbled a little, and Radek wound up falling back onto—

“Dr. McKay?”

“Dr. Cole?” Rodney asked, as the doctor steadied Radek and whipped out a scanner, her face scowling at the noises it made. 

“Where’s Col. Shepard?” she asked, taking a step towards Rodney only to he held back by a grey-tinted, black-clad hand with fingernails that were halfway morphed into earth-brown talons. 

“No,” a familiar voice said.

“Evan?” Rodney asked, his brain kicking into gear as he took in the other people in the team he had slammed into. Sure enough, it was Maj. Lorne, half-shifted to Dragon form, his eyes glowing green and skin tinged grey with patches of green and brown, and taloned hands, accompanied by a frantic David Parish, Dr. Cole, Radek, and six non-ATA positive marines of various nationalities whose names Rodney couldn’t recall (and had probably never known). “You can’t be here.”

“Rodney, where’s John?” David asked, his voice a little shaky.

Rodney blinked, realizing the enormity of the situation. Evan and David were here. Another _Dragon_ was onboard. If the Wraith found them now... John was running out of time, if there still was time. If Evan was shot too... maybe they would do something worse than chuck him out the nearest airlock. “You can’t be here. You shouldn’t have come. You have to go.” Rodney pushed off the wall and started forcing his way through the group of very confused Marines and back the way they’d come towards the Dart Bay. 

“Dr. McKay,” Dr. Cole said again, her hand flying out and grabbing Rodney’s soiled tac vest. “You’re injured. You have a head injury. Let me just—”

Rodney pulled away, narrowly avoiding overbalancing. He was hurt, but he was stronger than he looked, and already healing. 

“Rodney—”

“Don’t.” Evan’s voice came out halfway between a hiss and a growl, but there was no doubt the word was an order, not a request. 

Dr. Cole stilled and didn’t try to move again. 

Rodney turned back and looked Evan up and down. “I didn’t know you could still talk like that.” He shrugged. “Actually I didn’t know there was a partial shift. Carson must be fascinated.”

“Where’s John?” This time it was Evan who asked.

Conflicted, torn between the concentration and effort required to explain and the desperate need to keep moving to get to John and avoid being found by the Wraith and keep them from gassing Evan, Rodney realized there was another option. He started walking again, pushing his thoughts at the others. He felt a distant roar and flurry of indignation that told him more than he wanted to know. “You brought others? How many Dragons? How many ships? Wait is that Teyla?” he asked as Evan gave off a hiss that smelled of smoke. 

“What do you mean they threw him out the nearest airlock? They have the gas? Here?” David was whispering frantically. 

“Are you saying Colonel Sheppard is dead?” Doctor Cole asked unhelpfully, her voice rising in shock. 

“No!” Evan, Rodney, and David said in unison. 

The Marines were looking confused and troubled, which was bad, because they were Atlantis Marines and they were supposed to be well-trained and used to WTF situations. Rodney shot them a wary glance and resumed his trek towards the Dart Bay. Now that he knew there were two cloaked Puddle jumpers onboard and a slew of Dragons who could be in grave danger if they didn’t get out of there _stat_ , it was easy to double his speed. In fact, he was moving so fast, he got the sense the others were having trouble keeping up... well the humans anyway, David was matching him stride for stride, while Evan was a constant fuming presence behind Rodney’s right shoulder.

“The Wraith have a gas. The Ancients call it Dragonsbane. It incapacitates any Dragons in range and renders them unconscious. Ten thousand years ago, it was responsible for giving the Wraith control of the Pegasus galaxy...”

Rodney listened to David ramble on, relieved that David could talk even faster than he. Rodney let his attention drift, David’s explanation a dull echo in the back of his mind. Instead, Rodney focused on the Ascendeds’ directions, his thoughts every so often drifting across the bond to John, his heart hammering as every time the spark seemed dimmer and dimmer. They were running out of time. 

“What I don’t understand is how Col. Sheppard could still be alive. The explosive decompression from exposure to hard vacuum alone—”

But Dr. Cole didn’t finish her sentence because in unison, Evan, Rodney, and David, stopped and made the signals for “halt” and “silence.” 

Evan pressed a 9mm into Rodney’s questing hand without a word being spoken. 

The silence that had fallen was eerie and too still. Even the soft eddies and currents in the fog seemed to stop. 

Ten seconds later Ronon and Teyla came barreling around the corner, obviously breathless, but yet near silent. 

“I thought you were the rear guard?” Rodney whispered. At least he thought that was what he’d understood in the frantic swirl of information that was pouring from the other telepaths. 

“Wraith,” Teyla whispered by way of answer. 

“Two teams. They’re investigating the malfunction in the Bay doors,” Ronon explained. “We had to move or give away our position. We’re gonna hafta find another way back to the ‘Jumpers.”

“Are you crazy?” Rodney exclaimed. “There isn’t time!”

“Whoa, hold up. Where’s Sheppard?” Ronon asked. 

“They hit John with Dragonsbane and threw him out the airlock. I know where he is, or at least where he was and where he’ll probably drift, but if we don’t get to him soon, we’ll be out of time,” Rodney explained. “So there is no going around there’s no finding another entrance. We need to go back through that door, and we need to do it now. I did not claw,” he made scrabbling gestures with his hands, “my way out of a fetid, disgusting Wraith prison and come all this way just to lose John now.” He turned to Teyla and Ronon imploringly. “Please, the Ascended Ancients, they’re frantic. There’s something about this, about John, this hive, what’s happening here now. If we don’t—if we don’t save John, then everything the Dragons sacrificed will be for nothing, and the Wraith will win.”

“You mean Sheppard’s out there, and he’s still alive?” Ronon asked, pointing in the general direction of the nearest outer hull. 

“Yes,” Rodney answered. 

Teyla and Ronon shared a look, then Teyla turned to Evan and bowed her head. It was just a brief nod, but it was a clear sign of respect acknowledging Evan not as a military officer but as one of the Ancestors. To David and Rodney, she said, “We will go, and we will fight. These Wraith will not stop us from getting to John in time,” and turned back the way they’d come. 

They still had to go up one level and down another corridor, but they didn’t wait that long to encounter the Wraith. No sooner had they exited a stairwell on the next level, a patrol of four Wraith rounded the corner. 

There was an almost comical moment while the Marines all raised their weapons, the Wraith looked positively startled and Drs. Cole and Zelenka dropped to the ground behind them, sidearms drawn. For a moment no one reacted. 

But then Rodney saw the gun, the same gas cannon the Wraith had used earlier on John. He dropped to his knees, throwing himself in front of Evan, opening his mouth to shout a warning—

Everything happened in an instant. Rodney realized later that his recognition of the weapon had transmitted to every telepath in range. 

David dropped to mirror Rodney’s position, while Teyla called out for everyone to get down. 

There was a split second where reality seemed to freeze and then Rodney felt the air ripple around him, expanding and contracting with a ‘pop!’ It was just like the first time John had shifted on that pass... only it was nothing like that. 

“Oh shit!” Rodney exclaimed, throwing his arms over his head. 

Shifting on the edge of a precipice a few hundred meters up was nothing like shifting in the confines of a narrow ship’s corridor. As a Dragon, Evan wasn’t quite as big as John, but he was close, and his wingspan was just as broad. Even without spreading his wings standing on all fours he was taller than the corridor. 

He heard the others scatter behind them, diving out of the way of Evan’s tail. Rodney flattened himself to the deck, choking on the fog. 

Evan’s roar was deafening. The walls rippled and collapsed with the force of Evan’s transformation. Fire, red, orange, white-hot and blazing, shot from Evan’s open mouth and poured over the Wraith. The walls buckled and charred in the fire’s wake, the leathery membranes shriveling and cracking before melting back to nothing. The fire roared as oxygen flooded into the hallway from the stairwell and all the surrounding rooms laid bare by the disintegrating walls, and the burst of flames turned into an expanding fireball. The Wraiths’ cries and shouts of shock and pain turned into insectoid screams and squeals that seemed to pierce Rodney’s brain. Explosions echoed throughout the surrounding ship. And then the alarms started the familiar, high-pitched screams of the Wraith equivalent of a Red Alert. 

Evan’s roar stopped and just as suddenly as he had transformed, he changed back, not to human form, but to the same partially shifted in-between state he had been in before. The room popped with the sudden vacuum caused by Evan’s shift.

Rodney dared look up, peeking around his bent arm. Above, the ceiling shook and a few charred chunks that smelled distinctly like burned, rotten fish fell to the ground. 

“They know we’re here,” Ronon observed. 

“Heh, ya think?” Rodney retorted, looking around. He thought he saw the iridescent shine of a Wraith boot toeing around the edge of one of the holes. “We gotta move.”

“Everyone, to advance to the Dart Bay,” Teyla called out, motioning with her arm. 

Evan grunted agreement. 

There was a moment’s hesitation, before everyone moved at once, scrambling to their feet. 

The air was filled with the tang of ozone, and the fog that normally hovered above the decks was gone. Rodney had the distinct impression life support in this part of the ship had been shut down, or rather, destroyed. 

They picked over the iridescent, carbon-scored floor, careful of the rubble and debris that blocked their way. Rodney spotted the gas cannon sticking out from under one of the chunks of ceiling tile. “Teyla,” he called out pointing at it. 

Without further explanation, she rushed forward to pick it up, careful to keep it far from Evan, Rodney, and David. “We can analyze this on Atlantis, perhaps find an antidote. Dr. Cole,” she turned and handed the gun over. “Please keep this safe and ensure no ATA-positive personnel are exposed.”

Dr. Cole nodded and took the gun with shaking hands, her lips moving, but no sound came out.

It was only then that Rodney realized how shaken the others looked. Dr. Cole and the Marines all looked shell-shocked, stunned, slightly horrified. 

Not Radek, though. Radek just had the wide-eyed, dusty, charred, slightly wild look he got when exposed to action. And then Rodney understood. Radek had seen them all before. He was a surer ally to Dragon-kind than even Dr. Weir, but the others... Knowing your colleague, your commanding officer was a Dragon—a good Dragon—was one thing, seeing it first hand was another. Sure they’d all seen Evan’s partially transformed state, but the difference between that and seeing him shift into a 6.5 meter-long Dragon, was something else entirely.

“I promise, my people wish you no harm,” Evan growled with that Rodney was pretty sure was a note of humor. 

There was another moment of awkwardness, and one of the Marines snorted. Another giggled, and then Dr. Cole seemed to relax. And like that the tension eased. 

And not a moment too soon. “Wraith!” Rodney called out, as a soldier’s white dreadlocks and stunner appeared through one of the holes in the ceiling.

The rest of the trip back to the jumper passed in a blur. The Wraith opened fire, and the Lanteans fired back. Wraith fell, one of the Marines got stunned, and everyone ran, two other Marines carrying their unconscious comrade between them. They reached the door to the Bay and fought through the three squads now waiting there. When a fourth squad rounded the corner carrying another gas cannon, Evan again shifted, exhaling a fireball that took out the fourth squad, the remaining Wraith from the other squads, and the bay doors. After that it was just a matter of running to where Rodney could feel the Puddle Jumpers sitting cloaked, almost calling out for them. 

They were greeted by Cadman, Carson, Miko, and Heightmeyer—Kate—and Rodney could feel the others had taken up defensive positions inside the cloaked ‘Jumpers, crouched unseen with weapons trained on all who approached.

“Where is John?” Miko demanded, rushing towards Rodney even as Kate tried to calm her. 

Carson had his scanner out and was hovering around them, like a buzzing bumble bee.

“Dr. Beckett,” Teyla called, breaking Carson out of the fugue state he’d seemed to have slipped into. “Corporal Stevens took two stunner blasts to the chest in quick succession, he needs your attention.

And so the waiting Dragons and their partners scrambled again, making room for the injured crewman and shifting around the occupants of the two jumpers. It gave Rodney a much-needed distraction and a welcome moment of privacy.

“Rodney,” Miko said, her tone warning.

“He’s floating in space,” Rodney said softly. “I—I have a theory about what should have happened when they threw him out the airlock, but I don’t—I won’t say anything until we have him. I know it’s ridiculous and superstitious, but I—”

“You can’t take that chance.”

Rodney looked up, surprised to see it was Sergeant Mehra, Dr. Simpson’s partner, who had spoken.

“Yes,” he nodded, then thought better of it and clarified, “I mean, no, I can’t take that chance.”

“Corporal Stevens is stable and secured. Let’s go!” Dr. Cole shouted out.

There was a roar behind them, as Evan transformed again and sent a fireball back into the already-burned portion of the ship. A handful of darts were caught in the fire and exploded, one of them bouncing and blowing up another ship parked next to the outer hull—far too close for Rodney’s liking.

“Major!” he screamed over the din. “Let’s go! No punching holes through the ship while we’re outside the comfy confines of our Jumpers!”

Evan didn’t respond, but he did shift back, and when it was clear there were no more Wraith coming, at least for the moment, he and the rest of the rear guard, jogged back to the waiting ramps of the jumpers.

It took a little more shuffling—during which Rodney realized with shock that Carson and Dr. Simpson had both spent the long trip from Atlantis separated from their partners—but eventually they got situated in the Jumpers. Rodney rode in the first with Evan, David, Teyla, Ronon, Carson, and Cadman, while everyone else piled into the second jumper, which was once again piloted by Miko. As it was, Rodney was worried they wouldn’t have enough space… But there really wasn’t anything else they could do.

Worry and anger were emanating from Evan in waves. Teyla and Ronon both smelled of guilt at letting John and Rodney go offworld without them, and well, Rodney _needed_ Carson on hand. And he needed Carson functioning on all cylinders, and that meant bringing Cadman with him.

“Any plans for getting out of here?” Rodney asked, hovering behind the pilot’s seat. 

“Miko and I left a little present, while they were… _rescuing_ you,” Cadman answered with a sly smile.

“You set charges?” Rodney asked.

“All around the Dart Bay. It should give us the exit we need, while keeping the Wraith occupied and reducing the likelihood we will be pursued by Darts,” Cadman proclaimed sounding very proud of herself.

Then again, why wouldn’t she be? Explosives were Cadman’s domain. 

Sure enough as soon as the second ‘Jumper lifted off, a series of explosions rocked the outer perimeter of the Bay, punching holes through the hull and blowing the Bay doors wide open. 

As Evan steered them through the opening with the least debris in the way, Carson spoke, “I still don’t understand Rodney. How are we rescuing John?”

“Evan,” Rodney answered, leaning over the console between Evan and David and punching in the coordinates and trajectory he had memorized. “I need you to fly us to these coordinates and start a sweep in this direction, as fast as you can.” Rodney reached out with his mind, relieved when Miko in the second ‘Jumper understood what he wanted her to do. “Miko is going to fly interference for us and pick off any darts that come our way. Be on the lookout for weapons fire. I think the explosions and fires should have them scrambling for a while, but we don’t want to get taken out by a random shot.” 

“Sure thing,” Evan answered, sounding more human than he had the entire mission. He was still tinged grey and green with glowing eyes, so Rodney chalked that up to adapting rather than relaxing. 

“Everyone else, I need you to find a place up front and make sure everything in the aft compartment is secured. We’re going to be opening it to space.”

Carson raised an eyebrow at Rodney’s demands, but he, along with everyone else, complied. 

In the distance, two darts made it out of the burning wreckage of the Bay only to be immediately shot down by Miko’s ‘Jumper. One of the hives weapons was firing, but quite feebly, and so far, none of the blasts had come close to either jumper or the area where John was floating. 

They were so close, but not moving fast enough. They had reached the coordinates where John had been when Rodney consulted the computer, but now they had to find where he drifted. Rodney was prodding the connection continually now. No longer running for his life, he had nothing better to do, and it was all he could manage to keep panic from setting in. With each passing moment, the spark was getting dimmer and dimmer and—Rodney couldn’t let it go out. He reached out and latched on to it, forcing life and love and desperation through the bond, willing John to hold on, just a little bit longer.

Still, it wasn’t enough, and Rodney could feel John starting to slip away. Rodney’s hands gripped the back of David’s seat, squeezing, holding on, his knuckles turning pink then yellow then white as the chair groaned under the strain.

“What the hell is that?” Cadman asked, suddenly, pointing ahead towards the left side of the view screen. 

In unison, every head in the Jumper turned to look where she was pointing.

Up ahead was a large patch of space where the star field was distorted and the light from the system’s sun seemed to catch and reflect and bounce around, like a giant bug or mirror were floating in space, playing crazy havoc with the sunlight. It was enormous and blue-black and scaly and—

“John!” Rodney exclaimed. A breath, nothing more, barely audible even in the stillness of the Puddle Jumper.

“What in bloody hell? How in the name—” Carson stammered.

“I thought—he was in human form when they shot him. I saw the… images from your mind,” David said, sounding a little betrayed.

“He was,” Rodney confirmed, finding his voice. “But I—I had a theory.”

“A theory?” Carson asked, springing from his seat and physically pushing Ronon out of the way of his med kit.

“We know from the Ancient database and some of the stories Cora has told us that they launched Dragon offensives through space gates,” Rodney began.

“Aye, so we know those of us with scales can survive hard vacuum for a wee moment. But Rodney, those Dragons hurled themselves from space gates in low orbit and glided through the atmosphere to the world below. Their exposure to vacuum would have been minimal. Their biggest risk was heat from reentry,” Carson protested, as he rearranged the contents of his kit.

“But they _could_ survive in vacuum. And one of the stories, uh—” Rodney snapped his fingers, trying to recall the name of one of the few other Ancients who helped Cora in their training, “—Antara told us was a fable about the resilience and protectiveness of the Dragon spirit. It echoed a lot of what Cora told us about the instinct to change being so strong, self-preservation in its purest form,” Rodney continued. He tore his eyes away from the viewport and found Teyla’s. “An instinct that strong could work even if a Dragon was unconscious. I’ve been able to feel a _spark_ in John through our bond, ever since they took him from me. It’s been getting fainter, but it’s still _there_.”

“I hate to be the negative one here, but is he going to fit?” Cadman asked. 

“Yes, just barely,” Rodney answered as Evan said, “Without much room to spare.”

“He folds in on himself when injured. I don’t know if it’s a Dragon thing, or just a John thing, but when he’s hurt he makes himself small. He was hurt before they gassed him, so…” Rodney shrugged. 

“What were you going to do if we hadn’t come?” Cadman asked.

“Hope like hell he’d fit in a Wraith Dart’s storage system.”

The next few moments passed in silence, the telepaths too deep in concentration to speak and Ronon being polite enough to let it go, or respectful enough, reverent enough, to not ask. 

The door to the aft compartment sealed as tightly as it could, Rodney held his breath as they opened the rear hatch, releasing it little by little so it wouldn’t blow out entirely as the atmosphere rapidly escaped. He shivered in the growing cold as Evan gently, slowly eased the ship back the edges of the hatch catching slightly as the ship enveloped John’s contorted Dragon form. He breathed again, measured and shallow, as the hatch finally sealed and they began the slow process of repressurizing the ‘Jumper.

The moment Evan declared it clear, Rodney had the doors open and was sliding to his knees, beating even Carson to John’s side. 

_John_! Blue-black scales and armor plates surrounding fragile life—muscle and sinew and bone and blood and veins. Delicate, membranous wings, so thin, gone brittle with the cold, bent—maybe broken—frozen in the awkward position John had slumped. His right side looked crumpled, still not fully healed from the accident during their capture. Eyes closed, muzzle coated in ice, there was no sign of life, not telltale breath, no sign of a beating heart. Yet somehow, he wasn’t yet gone. Not completely. Rodney could still feel him there.

“John,” Rodney breathed, resting his cheek against John’s muzzle, and cradling the silver scales around his right foreleg. He reached out, grabbing at that spark of life and holding on. Rodney didn’t need to hear the dire proclamations from Carson—proclamations of no pulse, no breathing, calls for syringes of epi, debates of whether CPR could be performed on a Dragon, difficulty locating brainwaves on the scanner—to know John’s life was in the balance. He could feel that perfectly clearly within himself. The connection fraying and thinning, the _echo_ in is mind growing harder and harder to hear.

“John, don’t leave me,” Rodney said, only, this time he didn’t say it out loud. He pushed it through the bond, pouring himself out and into John. Beseeching him, begging… _Don’t go and don’t ascend. We need you—I need you. I just figured out so much about who we are and how we can defeat the Wraith, and I need you to make it possible._

Nothing, still nothing. Not a stirring, not a breath. No flare in the spark.

_Forget that. John, I don’t want to live without you. I don’t care how terrifying it is, or how likely we are to be punished or killed or burned at the stake. I love that you’re a Dragon. I love that I can talk to you like this. I love that we have so much to offer the universe, together. I love that your mother’s memory lives on in you in your Ancient heritage, and I want to share that with you and a new generation of Dragons, but to do that, I need you here, with me, in the real world. The mortal plane._

Again nothing. And Rodney despaired, his… soul, for lack of a better term… the essence of who he was, the part of him that could ascend if he were so inclined, the energy of his being cried out in pain. It was so cold, so alone, the searing blackness of space crushing him.

Only the blackness was growing warm, first painfully hot, fire and knives, like holding a hot cup of tea in frost-chilled fingers. But then the harsh burn soothed and mellowed, and slowly, slowly Rodney was warmed from within. And he was not alone. The spark flared and spluttered and flared again, and bloomed, blossomed, in a rolling explosion of light and love. 

“John?” Rodney asked again, and this time, he felt the answer, calling back to him.

There was a deafening pop, and Rodney found himself falling to the deck, only to catch himself at the last moment. He raised his head, and sure enough, there was John, back in human form, covered in tattered strips of clothing, eyes bright with laughter and love. “I’m here, Rodney,” John croaked, his voice hoarse from trauma and disuse. 

“I don’t know what happened or how you did it, Rodney, but you stabilized him,” Carson proclaimed at last. “Hurry, someone fetch the Colonel a clean uniform.”

But neither Rodney nor John was listening. Instead they were forming a plan, musing on the pieces of the puzzle that were fitting together in their minds. The vulnerabilities of the Dragons, the strengths of their telepathic mates… The ability of the Dragons to survive in vacuum.

“Rodney, John, are you even listening?” Carson asked, exasperated.

“We know how to kill the Wraith,” John said at last, smiling at Rodney.

Rodney leaned in for a kiss, unable to resist and not caring if anyone saw. “All the Wraith,” he clarified.

“Pardon?” Carson stammered.

“Did you know that a Dragon’s respiratory system can hold enough oxygen, even in vacuum, to burn two city blocks to the ground, and that’s not even counting secondary explosions or igniting artificial atmosphere,” John asked, his voice stronger with every word.

“We do it now, here. This hive goes no farther. Their weapons and knowledge will not leave this place,” Evan answered.

“Why do I have a feeling I’m not going to like this?” Carson asked.

“Because you’re not,” Rodney answered, bluntly.

“But Miko’s gonna love it,” John laughed.

~~~

_**Epilogue** _

Years later when there were stories told about the day the Wraithslayers took flight, soaring across the starfields of Pegasus, burning the Great Wraith Birds from the sky, John would always laugh, because the majestic tales really didn’t tell the half of it.

Sure, to an outside observer, it probably looked impressive as hell to see shapes falling into space from nowhere and shifting into broad-winged Dragons. 

But John could never forget how it felt. The falling, the sudden explosion of vacuum, the absence of pressure and the rush of air out of the Jumper as he fell, for the second time, the first time he did so voluntarily, his shape shifting the moment he was clear of the ‘Jumper. He and Evan and Carson fell from one Jumper, while Simpson, Miko, and Markham fell from the other. Carson had complained and been generally terrified, but he had sucked it up—and eventually stopped complaining—and was absolutely brilliant. As it turned out, shifting in vacuum was not only instinctual to Dragons, but it _felt_ right.

But like John always remembered the Dragons weren’t even half the story. The real story was the support and guidance they got. The ability to communicate not just with each other, but with the humans they were sworn to protect. The big sacrifice was in their partners, their mates, staying behind in the jumpers as they guided their Dragons through the attack. 

More impressive still was the second ‘Jumper where Stackhouse, Dusty Mehra, and Kate Heightmeyer waited, focused, guiding their mates, while crammed in the forward compartment of the Jumper with six Marines (one injured) and Doctors Cole and Zelenka. It seemed impossible, but somehow they had made it work. 

The stories never captured how it felt either, when they finally traversed the distance to the Wraith hive and John opened his mouth and let out the first burst of flame. The air stored in his lungs, igniting and burning through the hull before the vacuum could snuff it out. It was glorious, victorious… it felt like every ounce of suffering, every drop of blood, every tear shed by his people in the past ten thousand years was finally worth something, and he could find solace in the knowledge that his actions had brought them back, restored them to their birthright, finished the unfinished business their Ancestors had been forced to abandon ten thousand years before. 

And when the fires lit and the Hive burned, and the explosions within filled the starscape with orange light, he could see his fellow Dragons against the backdrop of space—Miko’s brilliant reds, Carson’s blues and golds, Evan’s painted pattern of grey with green and brown, Markham’s white and blue, Simpson’s deep purple, and his own inky blue-black highlighted against the sky for all to see.

Of course the best part of the story was when the _Daedalus_ arrived, a glittering jewel hanging in the sky, filled with people gasping for breath as they realized Dragons were gliding through space, setting the Wraith ablaze. Even better yet, was when Dr. Jackson’s voice joined in the chorus and his mind slipped into the telepathic field to help finish the fight. But best of all was the moment Gen. O’Neill’s golden-scaled form spread its blazing orange wings and sprang from the _Daedalus’s_ hangar to join the fight. 

A Wraith hive burned that day, taking its support ships along with it. But a new legend was born. One that understood Dragons could be friends to humankind, could use their powers to protect, not destroy. And slowly, but surely, thanks to the eyewitness accounts of every person onboard the _Daedalus_ attitudes changed, and Earth opened her arms to the Dragons once again.

But before then, and after the battle, there was acceptance and love and joy and relief as the Dragons flew aboard the _Daedelus_ and reunited with their mates. 

John knew then it was but the first battle of many, but for the first time since he was a little boy, he felt safe. Dragons were good. Dragons protected human kind. But most of all, Dragons could be loved. And he felt that love as Rodney wrapped his arms around him and welcomed him home.

_The end?_


End file.
